“I’m so, so sorry, Carrie.”
Ellie stepped forward. “If I could interrupt, Ms. Blank?”
The attorney looked at her impatiently. “What?”
“You know who the most likely suspect here is, don’t you?”
“Look, I honestly have no idea.”
“Anthony Amaro, or someone he sent on his behalf. Where is he, and why are you representing the man who killed your own sister?”
The attorney swallowed and immediately composed herself. “This is completely inappropriate, Detective Hatcher. You are attempting to interfere with my client’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel. I will file the necessary complaint with the Utica Police Department about the break-in, but, frankly, you’re a private citizen here as far as I’m concerned. Unless you have some other reason to speak to me, I’d ask you to give us some privacy.”
Carrie Blank’s words were firm, but Ellie could tell that the sudden transformation into a tough-talking lawyer was forced. Something about her demeanor had shifted. She had her doubts about Amaro’s innocence.
Good. So did Ellie.
Ellie was channel-flipping through reality-show repeats when the word MAX appeared on her phone screen. As much as this case had highlighted some differences between them, she never would have believed that three letters could make her so homesick.
“Hey.”
“You sound tired.”
“Must be sympathetic sleep deprivation. Rogan was fading. I sent him away for a nap while we had the chance.”
“Ooooh, a nap sounds good.”
She allowed herself to shut her eyes and pretend she was home in their bed, that she’d never heard the name Anthony Amaro.
“We got another message,” he said, breaking her daydream. “This time, a phone message, left with the switchboard. She said her name was Debi Landry, calling for me about Anthony Amaro. Obviously, I called back right away. The woman who answered was a Debi Landry, but she said she had no idea who I was. She insisted she’d never heard of me and didn’t call. So then I said, ‘The call was about Anthony Amaro,’ and she said, ‘What’s this got to do with Tony?’ Get this: she was in foster care with him when they were children.”
According to Buck Majors, Amaro had said he was in New York City to see someone he’d lived with in foster care. “But she wasn’t the one who called you?” she asked.
“Not according to her. I pushed a little, since the last time we got a mysterious tip, it led us to Harris. I asked if Amaro had ever told her anything about his involvement in the murders. She went ballistic and said that we had no idea what they’d gone through. How Amaro protected her. How there was no way she would call a DA about him, that he was the best thing that ever happened to her as a kid. She told me not to contact her again unless she had the right to a lawyer, and hung up.”
“Any way to track the original call to the switchboard?”
“Nope.”
The line was quiet. Someone out there was sending them information, but they didn’t know who, or why.
She heard a beep on her phone. Another call was coming in. It was Jess. “Oh, I gotta get this. Love you.” She clicked over to the new call. “Hey.”
“Some favor, little sister. Mona’s freakin’ terrified.”
“Of what?”
“I asked her if the cop she remembered from Utica was named William Sullivan, and she said yeah, that sounded right. And then she asked me why. I told her that Amaro got out and you were up there, doing your whole Cagney and Lacey thing. She flipped when she heard Amaro was released. Now she’s wondering if it was a cop all along, like her friends suspected. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with this. I’m telling you, Ellie, I’ve never seen her this way. She’s terrified.”
“Please reassure her, Jess. She’s not involved, and I won’t let her be. You vouch for me, okay? Tell her she’s just fine where she is.”
Rogan had accused her earlier of making this case more complicated than it had to be, but as she hung up her phone, Ellie found herself wondering whether Mona might not have good reason to be afraid of William Sullivan.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
Carrie was focused on the center of a pink tulip. It should’ve died weeks ago, but somehow this one stem lingered on at the edge of the courtyard behind the hotel.
She was outside because she couldn’t stand to hear another apology from poor Thomas. He was trying to Scotch-tape scraps of torn pages from the floor of her hotel room into usable documents. She didn’t think he would sleep until someone forgave him.
Her thoughts were broken by the sound of her phone. As she expected, it was Linda. She couldn’t put this off any longer.
“Hi, Linda. I don’t know what’s wrong with my cell phone here. I keep losing my signal.”
“I spent most of the day talking to Tony.” When had he become “Tony”? “He’s panicked. He called me collect from a pay phone. He got a call at the motel from his sister, saying that a girl he knew from foster care was trying to reach him. Her name is Debi Landry. She told Tony that an ADA called her. It was Max Donovan, and he insisted that he had received a message from her. He was asking her a ton of questions, trying to get her to implicate Tony. Did you see her name mentioned anywhere in the case records?”
“Not the ones I’ve reviewed. At least, not so far.”
“You’re still not done? How is that possible?”
Carrie knew the answer she wanted to give her: Because I’ve been running around Utica, trying to explain myself to Melanie and my mother and Tim and Mr. Sullivan? Because you pile more work onto one attorney and one assistant than could possibly be completed? Because you’re an insane woman who practices law by the seat of her pants instead of doing anything methodically and thoughtfully? Because some stranger pulled a Tasmanian Devil in my hotel room.
The truth was that Carrie hadn’t been able to bring herself to help Thomas complete the impossible task of identifying which, if any, case materials had been stolen. She’d looked through her personal belongings. The only thing that was missing was the journal she’d left on the nightstand. She realized she cared far more about that than anything relating to Anthony Amaro.
It was suddenly clear what Carrie had to do.
“I don’t think this is working out.”
“Well, what do you need? Would an investigator help?”
“No. I mean, it’s not working out at all. I don’t want this. I wanted to find out who killed my sister. You told me that Anthony Amaro was innocent, and that I could help get to the truth. I’m not insulting what you do. I get it. But it’s not why I am here. I think you know I’m only in the way. I’m too close.”
Carrie realized that part of her wanted Linda to argue with her. Why did she care so much about what people thought of her?
But she was relieved when Linda said, “Fine, take the next train back to the city if that’s what you want. No hard feelings.”
“Thanks, Linda.” She started to add an apology, out of habit. She was always apologizing, but this time, she wouldn’t have meant it.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT
It was two hours later and still no sign of Rogan. He wasn’t kidding when he said he needed some sleep. Ellie had been monitoring the activity in the hotel lobby, and Carrie Blank was nowhere in sight.
Instead, she spotted Will Sullivan at the far end of the first-floor hallway. He didn’t look especially happy to see her, but he didn’t run away, either.
“Any progress with the break-in?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t call it progress. The hotel has cameras, but only to monitor the car prowls and hand-to-hands going down in the parking lot. Anyone in or out on foot could just stay close to the perimeter of the building and avoid detection.”
“What about inside the building?”
“Maybe the hotels in New York do that.” It was another obvious dig. “But they don’t have high-tech gear on the floors here. Hotel security has been helping us tou
ch base with all the employees, but it’s not exactly a hotbed of activity. They keep a very light staff. The housekeepers had mostly left for the day. No room service or anything. And no one reported seeing anything unusual. My gut tells me we’re not getting anywhere.”
“Any clear motive yet?”
“Nope, but it looks like the documents were the target. The attorney knows that at least one journal is missing.”
“It has to be Anthony Amaro. He’s out for the first time in eighteen years. Maybe he’s worried there’s something in those files he didn’t want to get out.”
“That’s an interesting way to look at it,” he said. “But in my Podunk experience, there’s this thing called attorney-client privilege. It usually means the one person a criminal defendant can count on is his attorney, and I watched Carrie Blank cry today because she owes a legal duty to that man, whether she wants to or not, and it was clear she was not about to break it. There’s also something called tabloid journalism. We don’t see it a lot here, but you must, down in the city, with the paparazzi and all. We had Taylor Swift up here filming a music video. You would’ve thought it was the world’s fair. Then you got the people who collect what they call serial-killer memorabilia. I think the pool down at the station house has the over-under for documents going up on eBay by the end of the day tomorrow.”
“What’s wrong with you?” The words were out of her mouth before she intended to speak them. Earlier, Rogan had accused her of focusing on Sullivan out of a subconscious hope that Max’s insistence on a fresh look would pan out. But now she was certain that Sullivan’s responses were seriously off kilter. “Don’t you even want to catch a killer?”
“You really want to go there?”
“Hey, what’s going on?” Rogan had risen from the dead. He did not look happy to find her going toe-to-toe in the lobby with Sullivan.
“Your partner was just accusing me of not caring about the deaths of six women.”
“I’m sure Miss Congeniality didn’t mean to suggest that—did you, Hatcher?”
Sullivan didn’t wait for an apology. “If you want to talk about dropping the ball, I’d point out that you barely mentioned earlier today that your victim Helen Brunswick was a psychologist up here. That seemed like something that should be looked at, so I ran her. She had a patient named Joseph Flaherty. She was so scared of him that she broke confidentiality and called us. The guy’s a major nut. He even turned up at my house more than a few times.”
“We went through the same steps,” Ellie said. “Helen Brunswick rotated through some of the hospitals up here before she quit. I figured out your connection to Flaherty as we were leaving the station house. Your names were in the reports.”
“Then why didn’t you say something? I thought this was supposed to be a we thing? Joseph Flaherty obsessed over me for a few years solid for no reason at all.”
“So how come you didn’t pursue charges against him? According to the reports, it was your neighbors who always called.” She could tell from the expression on Rogan’s face that he was regretting having left her alone so long.
“It got to the point that he was like a raccoon under the porch, except I’m not allowed to plant poison in a trap. It seems to me that you missed the main point: Joseph never tried to harm me, but maybe Brunswick had an instinct about him that she couldn’t really put her finger on. The only other patient she ever called about probably would’ve turned into Jeffrey Dahmer if a well-placed car accident hadn’t taken him out first.”
“We ruled out Flaherty for a reason,” Ellie said. “He was committed to a psych ward at Cedar Ridge when at least one of the victims was killed.”
“Well, here’s the problem with your logic. I saw that same information. But because I’m from here, and you’re not, I happen to know that half the staff at Cedar Ridge in the 1990s couldn’t locate their own ass with a flashlight. We used to find patients roaming in the woods, chanting at Taco Bell, sleeping behind the churches. It was easy to wander out. Plus, here’s the interesting thing: Flaherty’s on a mental hold right now.”
“Right.” Ellie remembered Rogan mentioning that fact when he told her Flaherty’s history, but didn’t understand why Sullivan was bringing it up.
“Did you happen to check the dates of the hold?” Sullivan asked.
She looked to Rogan for guidance, but he shook his head.
“Joseph turned himself in—which he never does voluntarily, by the way—a little more than a week after Helen Brunswick was killed. You happen to remember when that anonymous letter to your DA was postmarked?”
She recited the date from memory.
“Yep. Joseph locked himself down the very next day. I may be a dumb old-timer from a Podunk town, but that’s what we hicks like to call one heck of a co-inky-dink.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
It was only eight o’clock in the morning, but Carrie’s mother answered the door neatly attired in a crisp white cotton shirt and slim black pants. Even the morning after Carrie’s father had died, Rosemary Blank had gone straight from the first opening of her eyes in bed to the shower into a clean set of clothes. As she liked to say: Lose an hour in the morning and you’ll hunt all day for it.
“You don’t knock on your own front door, Carrie.”
Carrie hadn’t lived here in years, but she still had her own key. Her mother led the way to the small table in the kitchen. A half piece of blackened wheat toast was still on a plate—part of the same set of dishes Carrie had eaten from as a child. Next to her mother’s coffee mug was an open library book, jacket side up. The spine read: The Opposite of Spoiled. Her mother was always reading something.
“I was starting to wonder if everyone in Utica would see my daughter before I did.” She retrieved another mug from the cabinet next to the refrigerator, filled it with coffee, and handed it to Carrie. “Mrs. Lemon told me she saw you in the McDonald’s drive-through yesterday. I told her that wasn’t possible. My daughter would never poison her body that way.”
“Never!” Carrie said, sharing her mother’s knowing smile as they both took seats at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier. We’ve been working nonstop. So much has happened.”
“I saw on the news that he was released. Clearly, Linda Moreland hired the right lawyer for the job.”
Carrie had prepared herself for all the other reactions another parent might have given. Disappointment that Carrie had helped release a man from prison without clear proof of his innocence. Embarrassment at her association with a notorious and despised criminal. Fear of public reprisals.
But Carrie’s mother was proud of her.
“Why do you look so sad?” she asked. “You were hoping I might have some other reaction, so you can tell your friends how hard your mother is always pushing you?”
Clearly she had caught her mother in a playful mood. “No, it’s nothing. Or everything. I don’t know. I saw Tim yesterday. He was talking about Melanie. How she should have been the one to go away for school. Maybe she would have been able to cut it, even with TJ.”
“Not that again. If that was anyone’s fault, it was mine. You were trying to take care of me after Daddy died. Do you know how painful it was for me—after everything—to be the one who kept you from your full potential?”
She should have known that her mother was the wrong person to talk to about this. Carrie felt the tears starting again but pushed her emotions back. She had to get it together. “Sorry, Mom. It’s just been a rough couple of days. This case brought up a lot of old memories.”
“You’ll be fine. You always are.”
Carrie had been so afraid to tell her mother she had taken the job. Now she didn’t know how to tell her she had quit.
“There’s something I never told you, Mom.”
“Oh, I’m shocked. I thought daughters told their mothers everything.” The smile again.
“I saw you arguing with her. With Donna, that day she came to the house. I was
upstairs. You thought I didn’t hear over my music, but I was watching.”
“Why didn’t you come down?”
She stared into her mug. “I was scared. I’d never seen you so angry. And she sounded so—desperate. I thought if I came down, things would really explode. I planned to go to her later. I wanted to see her, and I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“If you think that’s any surprise to me, you’re wrong. Of course I knew you’d want to see her. That’s why your father and I prohibited it. You always had a soft spot for that girl. You would have forgiven her anything.”
“But that’s what I’m telling you, Mom. I know you saw me as the victim, but I was the one who insisted she take that money. I didn’t understand that she needed to be ready to stop using. She wasn’t, and I pushed that money on her. I made things worse, don’t you understand? When you guys shut her out, I felt like it was my fault. I wanted to see her—not to forgive her, but to apologize.”
Her mother was shaking her head.
“I never got a chance to say goodbye.” Carrie remembered the police report filed by Donna’s mother after she went missing. “Why didn’t you ever tell the police about that day?”
“I never needed to. We were only using the threat of pressing charges to keep her away from you.”
“I don’t mean the money, Mom. Donna told Marcia she was coming to our house the last time she saw her. According to the police report, you told the police she was never here.”
“Because she wasn’t. Not that day, at least. You were young. You’re misremembering the timing.”
Carrie was quite certain her memory was right. The day after the incident at the house, Carrie was tied up with a morning debate-team practice, followed by a full shift at the movie theater. But on Sunday, she’d gone to Donna’s house. Marcia said Donna hadn’t been home all weekend and she was beginning to worry. Carrie specifically remembered being grateful that she had a mother who would “begin to worry” five minutes after her curfew, not two days later.
All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher) Page 20
