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

by Alafair Burke

  Carrie knew something was wrong when she went to visit Donna at Cedar Ridge. The nice lady at the front desk checked the computer and reported they had no patients named Donna Blank. Carrie asked her to try Donna Haring, wondering if Donna had used her mother’s last name to conceal her identity. After all, the place was filled with people with all kinds of mental illnesses and problems far worse than Donna’s. The receptionist shook her head, trying to mask her pity. It was clear to Carrie this wasn’t the first time the woman had to disappoint a family member with that same reply.

  No rehab. No money. Just lies.

  The next time Carrie saw Donna, two weeks later, she was strung out on Sandy Avenue. She looked through Carrie like a stranger.

  Carrie’s mother found out, of course. Rosemary Blank found out everything. Carrie was supposed to be in her room, studying, but she could hear the phone calls and the arguments. Mom was threatening to press charges if Donna ever set foot in her house or contacted Carrie again.

  Carrie only saw her sister one time after that blank-faced stare on the street. At first, she didn’t hear the knock on the door. She was in her bedroom, taking a study break with her beloved TLC tape when she heard her mother yelling. Assuming it was a complaint about the volume, Carrie turned the stereo down, only to hear banging at the front door. Her mother’s voice, telling someone, “Go away. You know you’re not welcome here.”

  “Please, Rosemary. I didn’t mean it—not at first. But I got to Cedar Ridge, and I freaked out. I messed up. I need Carrie to know I’m sorry. Please let me talk to her. Pleeeeeeeeaaaase!”

  She watched her mother begin to step away from the door, then leap forward again when the pounding got harder. “You can’t do this!” Donna yelled. It sounded like Donna was kicking the door now. “I have a plan. I promise. I know a way to help make sure Carrie has what she needs—”

  At that, Carrie’s mother unlatched the bolts, yanked the door open, and planted herself in the entry like a professional linebacker. Carrie had never seen her mother so resolved. “I am the one who knows what Carrie needs.” The only sign that she was the least bit frazzled was the strength of her Chinese accent. “I am the one who has gotten her to where she is, and where she will go. And the only mistake I ever made with my daughter was allowing you and your mother to have any part of her life. You’re a waste of human life. You are nothing. If you had any decency, you would see the shared DNA in a girl as wonderful as my daughter and realize just how pathetic you are.”

  “I know. I do. And that’s why I have a plan. Please, I’m begging you—”

  Carrie knew better than to step from her bedroom.

  “As far as Carrie and I are concerned, you no longer exist. Come here again, Donna, and I will have you arrested. Your father agrees. We have a friend on the police force. We will press charges, and he will put you in jail.”

  “Right, because you and your friends—the people you approve of—are so much better than the rest of the world.”

  Carrie flinched as Donna tried to push her way through the entrance. Rosemary slammed it shut, secured the bolt, and pressed her back against the door. “Leave now, or I’m calling 9-1-1,” she yelled.

  “I’m going to fix this, Rosemary, whether you accept it or not.”

  In the silence, Carrie braced herself for another assault on the door, but there was none. The tension in her mother’s small body released, and the composure returned to her face. When she heard the sounds of her mother tinkering in the kitchen, she turned up the volume on her tape player a notch, resolving to find Donna later, when her mother wasn’t around.

  But she never did find her. No one did, not for another three months, when police discovered her body decomposing in Conkling Park.

  That’s how Carrie knew that the closing line of Donna’s brief missing-person report had to be wrong. “When last seen, daughter told mom she was going to her father’s house. Stepmother reports no knowledge of Donna going to house that day or since.”

  Had the police officer misunderstood her mother’s statement? Or had he been so dismissive of the missing-person report that he failed to listen?

  Carrie pulled up “Mom” on her cell but paused. She knew her mother. She could picture her being annoyed that Donna’s activities had brought a police officer to their door, not because she’d stolen Carrie’s money but because she was off being irresponsible. She could imagine her mother saying whatever she needed to avoid getting dragged into Donna’s drama. She knew her mother well enough to predict every word of the conversation that would ensue with a hit of the call button. She’d evade, claim she’d forgotten, and would hang up the minute Carrie pressed too hard. Rosemary Blank always knew what to say.

  What mattered was the case. Only one day in, and Carrie already knew for certain that the police had made at least one error in their investigation into Donna’s death.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Ellie was whispering to herself as she stripped off her long-sleeved shirt and wool pants.

  “Be careful what you wish for, Elsa.” It’s what her parents used to say whenever they caught her pining for something. It happened so often that Jerry and Roberta Hatcher, like Eskimos with multiple words to describe snow, had an entire vocabulary to discuss young Ellie’s desire to make her life a little better: “a case of the I wants,” “grass-is-always-greener complex,” “Little Miss Change-it.”

  Meanwhile, they chided her easygoing brother, Jess, as “complacent” and “apathetic,” all because he accepted life exactly as it presented itself.

  Two children from the same family, but entirely different cloth. Jess was dark and lean, with sharp, angled features. She was light and blond, with a heart-shaped faced and full, round lips. He barely graduated from high school, got fired from job after job, and still dreamed of being a rock star. She had worked the junior beauty pageant circuit to save money for college and had the same waitressing job for seven years before graduating from John Jay and joining the NYPD. And while Jess was the kind of person who looked around and said, “Yeah, this is fine,” Ellie was always the one who fussed.

  So for the last few weeks, as the thermometer had continued to read temperatures in the fifties and sixties well into mid-May, she had wished for some warmth.

  Well, like her parents used to say, Be careful what you wish for, Elsa. With her bare shoulder she wiped away a stream of sweat that was about to drip from her chin.

  Climate control in her old apartment had been simple. The furnace sounded like a mutant dragon on heroin, but it worked. And her only air conditioning was a window unit she had hauled home from P.C. Richard’s, jamming it into the window frame and securing it with two-by-fours until she could figure out how to install it properly. It used more electricity than everything else in her apartment put together and had a tendency to whine just as she was falling asleep, but she was the one who told it when to work and how much.

  Now that she and Max were in this fancy-pants building, she had lost all that control. As she’d learned three days ago from the super, something called a “chiller” couldn’t be turned on because four tenants had not yet allowed the maintenance men to clean out their individual blower units because “it gets too cold.” Without service, the entire system could go kablooey (his word, not hers). Something about clogs in the drains, back-ups, and floods. Four apartments out of three hundred. Now Ellie had a clear case of the “I wants”—as in “I want to track down these assholes and throw them from the fucking roof.”

  She had just changed into shorts and her favorite Pretenders T-shirt and settled onto the sofa when Max walked in, shaking a handful of mail in the air. “This was still in the box.”

  He had pointed out two weeks ago that she never picked up the mail from the lobby. He had also noted that she kept all her toiletries on one shelf, tucked her laptop into her bag every night before bed, and had yet to get a replacement driver’s license with their new address. To him, these were all signs that she di
dn’t truly think of the apartment as hers.

  Since then, she’d been trying to remember to pick up the mail and be a little less tidy. The DMV was another issue.

  “Sorry. I forgot.”

  “No problem. In other news, Liddy made a point of telling me to wear boxers, not briefs. Think she’s losing it?”

  Liddy was a very nice, very chatty woman who loved to sit in the lobby and partake in whatever conversations she could find. Ellie had never seen her without her navy-blue quilted Burberry jacket. That, combined with her tendency to warn neighbors to bundle up, placed her on the top of Ellie’s list of suspected air-conditioning holdouts.

  “I may have told her that my doctor said the unusually high temperatures in our apartment could be affecting my fertility.”

  “You shouldn’t joke around about stuff like that.”

  “Oh, come on, Max. It’s not like my womb is going to hear me mocking my fertility and close up shop.”

  She immediately regretted doubling down on what was a sore subject between them. Not long before they’d moved in together, Ellie was certain Max was going to break things off when he learned she had no interest in having children. Living together was supposed to be a sign of their mutual promise to let their relationship evolve naturally. Ellie couldn’t help feeling, though, that he woke up every day wondering when she was going to come around.

  Now a silly joke had become an issue. “What do you want to do for dinner?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “I would love a rare steak with a side of fries, but, alas, I just got a callout. Shooting in Tribeca. Looks like a gun accident, but the suspect’s a lawyer. They want an ADA at the scene.”

  “Couldn’t they call someone else? This Amaro thing’s getting hot, first with the press, now the new DNA evidence? Plus I’m pretty sure one of Amaro’s attorneys is Donna Blank’s sister.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I was hoping we could talk about the case tonight.”

  “Sorry, I want to, but I really gotta go.” He could see she was disappointed. He bent down and gave her a kiss. “The chief ADA’s the one who asked for me on this. And Martin himself wanted an update today on Amaro. This is all really good for me, Ellie. I’ll get home as soon as I can.”

  When the door closed, she looked around the apartment. It was tasteful and clean and well decorated. She removed their growing collection of take-out menus from the end table’s top drawer. She saw plenty of options, but nothing she loved. She was hot. And grumpy.

  She had to get out of here.

  She nearly put the key in the door out of habit. She never thought of relinquishing it; Jess had always kept a key when it was her place. But she was still getting used to knocking.

  “Hey,” Jess said by way of greeting as he opened the door a crack. His attention shifted immediately to the window behind the living room sofa. “Damn proselytizers. Can I borrow your gun?”

  “Definitely not. Not ever. Even if aliens invade.”

  She didn’t need to look out the window to know the group he was talking about. The religious sect had been preaching on that corner long before either of them set foot in this apartment. All these years later, she still wasn’t sure the basis of their belief system: some blend of Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism, from what she could gather. All she really knew about them was that they were very, very vocal. Literally vocal. Without a license to use amplification, they resorted to screaming. She’d seen them swallow teaspoons of honey to protect their vocal cords. They were serious about the volume.

  “How about a paintball gun?” Jess asked. “Is that illegal? If I played sniper and started nailing them with big splats of paint?”

  “Yep. Public disorder at the least. Criminal mischief for the property damage. Assault if you hit them hard enough. Not a good idea.”

  “Party pooper. It’s not that different from water balloons. Oh, and check your retro answering machine over there. Multiple messages from the mother.”

  Ellie had conditioned Jess’s takeover of the apartment on his maintaining her landline and answering machine, which existed for the sole purpose of communicating with their mother. As far as Roberta Hatcher knew, Ellie was prohibited from using her department-issued cell phone for personal calls. Keeping the landline at her old apartment had the added bonus of saving Ellie from telling her mother she was living in sin, and with a man Roberta hadn’t even met yet to boot.

  She pushed the button on the machine and turned down the volume as she played the messages. Typical Mom: reminiscing about the old days; wondering why her kids had to live so far away; one late-night call after too much vodka, talking about “Daddy.”

  “How about ipecac?” Jess was asking. “If I swallow ipecac before an evening stroll and they just happen to be on the receiving end of the resulting upchuck, that wouldn’t be illegal, would it?”

  “Well, if they could prove it was intentional—”

  “Let’s just forget this conversation, then, shall we?”

  “Step away from the window, Jess. I haven’t seen you for weeks.” She opened the fridge and helped herself to the two bottles of Rolling Rock remaining of the twelve-pack she’d brought the last time she was here. A jar of Nutella was exactly where she’d left it on the counter when she’d moved. She grabbed it, too, and a spoon, and then plopped down on the couch. Perfection.

  She had opened one of the beer bottles and was pulling her laptop from her bag when Jess finally stopped obsessing about the scene on the street.

  “Make yourself comfy there, El.”

  She smiled and waved, then pointed at the second bottle of beer on the steamer trunk that doubled as a coffee table. Given that Jess had slept on this very sofa more often than not when she was paying the rent, she knew he was kidding.

  On her laptop, she typed Caroline Blank attorney into Google and hit enter. The first listing was a brief professional bio on LinkedIn. Three semesters at Cornell University, followed, eight years later, by graduation at the top of her class from closer-to-home Cortland State. Law school was not quite as bumpy: after a first year at CUNY, she earned her J.D., with top honors, from Fordham.

  She searched the Utica newspaper archives and pulled up an old article called “Tale of Two Sisters.” Carrie Blank had been named the first recipient of a new scholarship called the Cyrus Morris Grant.

  The grant is funded by the Dream Foundation, which selects one school per year around the country, then selects one student from that school’s graduating class, to receive full tuition and room and board at the college of the recipient’s choice, backed by the prestige of the award to assist with admissions.

  It was a full ride to whatever college would have her. The interesting backstory: Carrie’s half sister had been found murdered only two months earlier.

  “Cyberstalking again?” Jess asked.

  “I guess you could call it that. I’ve got this case, and the defense attorney is the half sister of one of the victims her client is presumed to have killed eighteen years ago.”

  He shook his head quickly. “Way too much information there for this addled brain to process.”

  She gave him a more complete rundown on the story. Helen Brunswick, the therapist murdered with the same signature as Anthony Amaro’s string of killings. Brunswick’s ties to Utica, where Amaro confined his killing ground until he moved down to the city, and to Deborah Garner. Amaro now seeking to set aside his conviction with the help of Linda Moreland and Carrie Blank, half sister of one of Amaro’s victims.

  “Utica, twenty years ago? Is this the guy who killed a bunch of prostitutes?”

  “Six that we know of.”

  “I know a woman at the Big V who left Utica because of those murders.”

  By “the Big V,” Jess meant Vibrations, the so-called gentlemen’s club where he worked. The two of them had made a hobby of coming up with alternative names for the West Side Highway establishment: Booby Barn, Cans Castle, The Peeler and Feeler, Landing
Strip Cafe. Always classy.

  “You have a stripper old enough to have been in Utica two decades ago? Very, um, progressive.”

  “No. Mona’s not a dancer—not anymore, at least. They call her the ‘talent manager.’ She’s known the owner since way back. She’s basically a mama-type for the dancers.”

  “And you know her whole life story?”

  “Wouldn’t say that, but when you work late on slow nights you end up shooting the shit. I told her the old man was a cop—how he got all eaten up by the College Hill Strangler, did himself in, yada yada yada.” It was strange to hear from Jess that he’d spoken to anyone about their upbringing. Even with Ellie, he only brought up their father when it truly mattered. “And then she told me how she left Utica when she was in her mid-twenties—when she was still turning tricks out of the private dance rooms—because some sicko was killing girls left and right, and no one seemed to care.”

  “Think she’d be willing to talk to me?”

  “If I asked her. Super nice.”

  “Fine. I’ll pay for takeout. Then we can go?”

  “Deal, but I’m vegan now.”

  “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “Makes me feel better. Unclogs the pipes, if you will.” He could tell she wasn’t buying it. “It’s for a chick.”

  Jess never did anything for a relationship. As in, no phone calls, no schedules, no monogamy. A surprising number of women in this world didn’t seem to mind it. But now he was a vegan.

  She started to ask for details, but he said, “Nope, that’s all you get for now.”

  “Fine. Vegan takeout it is.” She stuck her finger in her mouth in a feigned gag. “But your Utica stripper mama bear had better make some time for me.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Carrie was nearly finished reviewing one of the boxes of documents she’d retrieved from Kristin McConnell but still had a long way to go. The more pieces of paper she rifled through, the more reports she suspected were missing. She had filled nearly an entire legal pad with notes: names of potential witnesses, questions she wanted answered, gaps in the investigation.