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

by Alafair Burke

  “Yeah, got into a white Malibu with an Oriental lady. You just missed him.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-THREE

  The headquarters of the Utica Police Department looked a lot like Ellie’s junior high school. Two floors. Blond brick. Occupied a quarter of a block. Most NYPD precinct houses were twice the size. Rogan reached for the front door, then paused. “You know this is going to blow, right?”

  “As in vuvuzela-levels of blowing. Come on, Double J, let’s get it over with.”

  They made their way to a desk sergeant at the front counter. Rogan explained they were from the NYPD and were hoping to talk to someone about Anthony Amaro.

  “Yeah, sure. Let me find him.”

  Now that they were here, they both realized how bad this was going to look to local police. They had come here—to their jurisdiction, from New York City, to talk to a witness who might know something about five women who died right here, in this city—and hadn’t bothered to make a courtesy call to the UPD. Now, to top it off, Amaro had been released, just outside their town, because of mistakes made by the NYPD.

  Ellie knew Rogan had been holding back his thoughts, so she decided to express them for him. “I know. Max should have looped in Utica law enforcement, even before putting together a fresh-look team.” She could see the failure as yet another signature Martin Overton move: avoid accusations that he’s covering for the past by starting with a completely fresh slate. But as a result, she and Rogan were now in someone else’s jurisdiction, in need of help they should have asked for a week ago. And as much as she wanted to blame the elected DA’s political motivations, she knew for a fact that Max, all too happy for the career advancement, hadn’t pushed back against his boss one bit.

  “Too late now,” he said. “How are we playing this?”

  “We’ll just have to tell them we’ve been moving nonstop. The DNA evidence. Helen Brunswick. Dealing with Linda Moreland. Rushing to Five Points. Hell, one look at you and those I-can’t-sleep-in-a-hotel bags under your eyes, they’ll know the pace we’ve been keeping.”

  “Please, on my worst day I’m still the finest man you’ll find around this joint. You and I both know that coming here to talk to Amaro’s old cellmate without going through UPD was a dis. We’ve been treating them like yokels.”

  A phone call would have been standard operating procedure if they hadn’t deeply believed that UPD had basically closed up shop on the Amaro investigation.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But think of it this way: the fact that UPD hasn’t contacted Max—despite all the news coverage of Amaro’s petition for release—pretty much confirms that our instincts were right.”

  Rogan shushed her as the door next to the desk sergeant opened.

  The man who walked out was probably in his late fifties but was trim and fit, his white hair and a few wrinkles around his eyes the only signs of age. “Detectives, I’m Will Sullivan. You’re here about Anthony Amaro?”

  “Have you heard from anyone in your DA’s office yet?” Rogan asked. “There have been some developments this morning down in the city.”

  “Nope. We knew he was asking to be released, but have been assuming it’s just a lot of talk. That case was solved years ago.”

  “Well,” Rogan said, “that’s the tricky part. His lawyers have attacked the most critical pieces of evidence against him—the eyewitness, the confession. It all started when a woman was killed in Brooklyn three months ago. Turns out the killer broke her limbs, postmortem. Then someone—we still don’t know who—mailed letters to both Amaro and the DA, saying Amaro’s innocent and the real killer’s active again. Plus, the crime lab found new DNA evidence on one of the victims, and it doesn’t belong to Amaro.”

  “Which victim?” The detective was twisting a red plastic coffee stirrer in his hands. One edge of it was flattened by teethmarks. Ellie thought of her own telltale way of holding a pen between her index and middle fingers. Will Sullivan was an ex-smoker.

  “Donna Blank,” Rogan said.

  He nodded. “But he wasn’t even convicted of killing her. It should still be fine, right?”

  They were obviously going to have to rehash every point and counterpoint that they themselves had raised this week. Ellie jumped in with a quick and dirty summary of all of the arguments made before Judge Johnsen. “Look, here’s the long and the short of it: we just found out that the judge granted the motion—for immediate release. Five Points cut him loose already. He’s in the wind.”

  “Anthony Amaro is free? Right now?”

  “And we don’t know where,” she said. “If you can put cars on the street to look for him—or if some of your guys have thoughts about where Amaro would go—we’ll help however we can.”

  “Help? You said you just found out yourselves that Amaro was released. Unless the two of you know how to hyperspace halfway across the state, you came here for a reason other than to help.”

  And here it goes, she thought. “We were scrambling for something—anything—that might keep Amaro in. We got a tip that one of Amaro’s former cellmates might have information. We came up to interview him: guy named Robert Harris. I believe you may have spoken to him during the original investigation.”

  Harris had mentioned that the detective he spoke to was William S-something. Will Sullivan seemed close enough. Something else seemed familiar about Sullivan’s name, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  Sullivan nodded slowly. “Yeah, I remember that guy. He thought pretty highly of himself, as I recall.”

  The response struck Ellie as bizarre. Harris had an ego, but when a suspected serial killer’s cellmate is willing to hand over even a used Kleenex, a decent detective should at least make note of it. She didn’t see any use in pointing this out to Sullivan eighteen years after the fact, however. “With the Garner case falling apart, we need him,” Ellie said. “One of the city ADAs is calling your DA here. The idea is to take what we have and get an arrest warrant for Amaro for the victims he was never charged with.”

  “Yeah, but the cellmate—you said his name was Harris, right?—he was reading something into nothing. I don’t know how you do it in the NYPD, but we don’t do a jailhouse snitch’s bidding here.”

  “We just need probable cause, enough to hold Amaro while we continue to work the case.”

  “We, huh? You realize that’s rich, don’t you?”

  “You’re right,” Rogan said. “It should have been both departments working together this whole time. You guys have the five victims. Downstate has Deborah Garner, and now Helen Brunswick—she’s the Brooklyn victim. But she has old ties here. She was a therapist. Did some training up here as a student. We need feet on the ground in both locations. To be honest with you . . . we’ve got a district attorney’s office that cares more about pleasing the public than protecting it.”

  “I don’t know what kind of public you have,” Sullivan said, “but no one around here’s going to be happy about Amaro being released.”

  “I think our DA figures people will be happy if they actually believe Amaro’s innocent. Then the DA’s the good guy for helping him get his freedom.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  At that moment, Ellie couldn’t disagree.

  Rogan’s candor seemed to quell Sullivan’s annoyance, but something about the mention of Helen Brunswick was tugging at the edge of Ellie’s brain. Some connection between Brunswick and Sullivan. “You didn’t know her, did you?” she asked. “Helen Brunswick?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. Look, I see your point about working together to get Amaro into his next holding cell. I know exactly who’ll be working on this at the DA’s office, so let me touch base with him and get back with you. You gonna be in town a while?”

  “At the Governor,” Rogan said. They handed him their business cards.

  He walked them to the front door, then stopped short when he saw another visitor entering. It was Carrie Blank.

  “Well, what kind of surprise is t
his?” Sullivan howled. “Carrie Blank! Just ran into your mom at the Target this week. She didn’t tell me you were here.”

  Ellie saw a white Chevy Malibu in the station parking lot. She pointed an accusatory finger at Carrie Blank. “Where is he? Where did you stash Amaro?”

  “You do your job, Detective, and I’ll do mine.”

  “Donna was your sister,” Ellie hissed. “How can you do this? Who else is going to fight for her if not you?”

  She felt Rogan’s grip on her forearm. “Let’s go,” he said gently.

  Ellie turned to face Sullivan. “You know her? She’s the one who picked up Amaro from prison.”

  Sullivan looked at her like she was unstable.

  As Ellie followed Rogan to the car, she glanced back over her shoulder. Sullivan had taken Carrie Blank up in a hug so tight that her heels lifted from the ground.

  She started talking before her butt hit the passenger seat. “He’s hugging the defense attorney? We haven’t slept for days, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. And yet somehow we’re the assholes?”

  He started the engine and pulled into the street. “Do you want a hug, too? Is that what this is about?”

  She flipped him a middle finger. “I like you better when you get your beauty rest. Seriously, think about your reaction to Linda Moreland, and meanwhile, Sullivan’s hugging her associate. You don’t think that’s weird?”

  “I don’t think I know enough about it for it to be weird.”

  “You heard him. He still thinks Amaro did it. And Carrie Blank’s sister is one of the victims. And she got the guy out of prison? And he hugs her?”

  “You know how you feel about Jess? Or Max?”

  “Of course I do. And that’s why I don’t understand how that woman can be helping the man who at least might have killed her sister.”

  “But I’m talking about Sullivan and that hug back there. Look at it this way: I know that some part of you is—let’s say, disappointed, in the shots Max has been calling on this case. And I’ve seen how it’s tearing you apart not to say anything. It’s because you still have a hug for that man at the end of the day. Hate to break it to you, Hatcher, but that’s love. When even your cold, unpenetrable heart holds sway over that hard head of yours, that’s unconditional love. Look it up.”

  “But Max and I live together. Are you suggesting that Sullivan and Carrie Blank—”

  “Damn, woman. Not everything’s so literal. I’m saying I heard the change in the man’s voice when he saw that girl. He knows her. He knows her moms, sees her at the Target. There’s a history there. Towns like this, people don’t mind their own business. That’s how I grew up, too—aunties and grandmas all chipping in. Everybody knows everybody, and the good parents mind all the other children. You ask me, he’s proud of that girl, so proud he can look past her working on Amaro’s case.”

  “He didn’t even seem to care that Amaro was out.”

  “That’s not fair, Hatcher. He didn’t even know at first. Once we told him Amaro had actually been released, he was pissed. You can’t measure everyone’s emotions by the number of F-bombs they drop.”

  “I think the whole thing’s weird. He obviously didn’t go out of his way back then to make sure that Amaro took his lumps up here for the other five victims. And you heard what Robert Harris said—Sullivan pretty much blew him off. And there’s something about his name. It’s familiar, like I already knew him when he introduced himself.”

  “Your self-proclaimed pedantic BFF told you he talked to a detective named William S.”

  “No, but it’s something else. Something about Helen Brunswick. Oh, I remember. It’s that crazy kid from the hospital. Brunswick had some concerns about one of her younger patients—a kid named, um . . .” Dammit, what was that kid’s name? She and Rogan had talked about the incident so quickly. “You showed me that big stack of reports over the years.”

  Rogan was making the connection now, too. “Oh, it was Joseph—”

  “Joseph Flaherty,” she said. “He was one of the two patients Brunswick called police about during her internship. You ran their histories to see if they might have held a grudge against her. In that big stack of reports were those nuisance calls on Joseph for yelling in a cop’s yard. The cop’s name was William Sullivan. I remember.”

  “Bully for you, Rainman. You must also remember that Joseph had an alibi for some of the killings because he was committed. As in, confined and incapable of murdering women. So he and whatever beef he had with Will Sullivan is background noise.”

  “You don’t think it’s a coincidence that the kid Helen Brunswick was scared of happens to have had some kind of obsession with Sullivan?”

  “Not really. It’s a small city. You saw that little hut of a police headquarters. Whole department is probably twenty bodies. I could see a nutjob like Joseph Flaherty getting hassled on the beat a lot—told to move along, not to be bothering people—he gets fixated on one of them. Makes sense to me. And again, how Sullivan dealt with some crazy teenager twenty years ago isn’t at the top of my concerns right now.”

  “Still, you have to admit he doesn’t seem to have bent over backwards to have Amaro charged up here when he had the chance.”

  “Those calls were probably made by the DA. But, okay, I’ll give the point: he’s not exactly a go-getter.”

  “I’m telling you: it’s weird.”

  “You have certainly told me that. Multiple times.”

  She pulled Jess up on her cell phone.

  “So, is Utica the shithole I said it was?” he asked by way of greeting. Jess had come here to play a bar gig with Dog Park four years earlier. After someone in the audience threw a beer bottle at the stage because they looked like “a bunch of homos,” Jess—straight in no other way than that one—swore he’d never go back to Utica. The episode could have happened anywhere, but Jess, as vehemently opposed to homophobia as any person could be, was holding firm on his boycott.

  “We’re not exactly sightseeing,” she said. “Hey, I need you to do me a favor. Can you call Mona?”

  “Three in the afternoon? She’s probably up by now. What do you need?”

  “Remember how she said she tried talking to a cop up here? She told him there was no way Donna Blank would go somewhere alone with a trick.”

  “The asshole threatened to arrest her.”

  “I need you to ask her if the asshole was named William Sullivan.”

  “Making friends up there, are we? Okay, let me see what I can do.”

  Rogan was giving her the stinkeye when she hung up.

  “I’m just checking.”

  “Keep your eye on the ball, Hatcher. Anthony Amaro.”

  “I can do two things at once. What’s left for us to do?”

  “First of all, play nice with Sullivan, because we need that man on board if we’re going to get an arrest warrant. And an alternative explanation for that DNA under Donna Blank’s nails would be helpful. Since her sister’s working for the defense, let’s go see what her mother might have to say.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  As Carrie felt her heels leave the ground, she wished she could enjoy Will Sullivan’s hug forever. As long as she was in the air, she was a little girl getting an airplane ride from Mr. Sullivan. Anthony Amaro and Linda Moreland didn’t exist. But then she felt the earth beneath her again, and Will’s brow furrowed when he focused on her face.

  “So, that was some scene with the detective.”

  “I would have preferred to tell you myself why I’m in town.”

  “Bill might’ve called a little while ago. Now, don’t get mad at him for beating you to the punch. He said you were all torn up about the direction of the case—worried that yours truly might end up looking bad.”

  “Possibly. Yeah.”

  “You think this is my first time to the rodeo? I know how this works. I suppose the strategy up here will be to blame us for not figuring out for ourselves that the NYPD sc
rewed it up—if one were to believe that claim. How’m I doing so far?”

  “Spot on.”

  “And you know how this town works, Carrie. You don’t think the city attorney’s office told me you’d requested my Internal Affairs records? I can tell you all the dirt in there, if you’d like. Ancient battles. Not even battles. More like bubbles.”

  “I should’ve realized that you’d already know anything happening in Utica.”

  “Well, I didn’t know Amaro had been released, I can tell you that.”

  “If it helps any, I agree. About the IA file, I mean. I’ll be telling Linda there’s no there there.”

  She’d found two complaints of excessive force, but that was typical for any officer who’d been around Utica as long as Mr. Sullivan. She had been surprised to find one complaint that Mr. Sullivan had helped a suspect out of a robbery charge for personal reasons. According to the storeowner, the responding officer was going to pursue felony charges until the more-senior Mr. Sullivan intervened. When the storeowner learned through the grapevine that the suspect was a friend of Mr. Sullivan’s son, he ran to IAB.

  The friend of Bill? Tim McDonough, who would have been Melanie’s boyfriend by then, about seven months away from impregnation.

  “I never realized Bill was friends with Tim back then,” she said. Part of her had to wonder if the friendship had anything to do with the drug use that would land Bill in rehab after graduation. She had to assume that Tim was a bad influence, even then.

  “More like acquaintances,” Will said. “Tim’s no angel, but that boiled down to grabbing a six-pack of beer and throwing a drunken punch when the storeowner caught him. Tim was twenty, so no juvi for him. I didn’t want to see the kid start life with a felony.”

  “You are so nice.”

  “Oh, that look on your face. Even when you’re not saying you’re sorry, you manage to telegraph it in other ways. Stop feeling guilty, Carrie. It’s like you told that detective: You do your job, she’ll do hers. And I’ll do mine. Things will work out the way they’re meant to.”