Carrie thought about trying to explain the timing to her mother, but took another sip of coffee instead. She didn’t have the energy to argue. And it didn’t even make a difference anymore. Anthony Amaro was out, and no one seemed interested in finding out who should be in prison, if not Amaro. All Linda Moreland cared about was money, and bringing down the police, and freeing more clients, and she had used Carrie as a pawn in a chess game Carrie barely understood.
This time, she couldn’t hold back the tears. She hadn’t felt failure like this since she had to pack up her dorm room in Ithaca. “I screwed up, Mom. It was too big. Too much. I didn’t stop and think.”
“About what?”
“The job. Linda Moreland. Anthony Amaro. I quit last night, Mom. I wanted to believe I got that job because I was so special, but she was using me. She wanted to hold me out there for all the world to see: Look, even the victims’ families believe he’s innocent. But I don’t, or at least I’m not convinced. And Donna’s killer, whoever he is? He’s still out there. I’m going back to the city tomorrow to beg my way back into Russ Waterston.”
Somehow her mother managed to piece together a meaningful thought buried in the words that were spilling out. “You won’t have to beg for anything, Carrie. You are the smartest, kindest, most talented person I know. And you’re a good person. You always have been. Anyone would be lucky to have you. You will always land on your feet. Any setback only makes you stronger. Because that’s what your father and I wanted for you.”
Carrie could feel her breath becoming more even. Her mother’s hushing sounds, the feeling of her warm hands soothing her back, made her feel like a child again.
“Do you understand now about the police report?”
Carrie looked up at her mother’s face.
“When they asked if she’d been here, she’d only been gone a few days. Donna was always coming and going. And then, later, once they found her—what difference would it have made? Donna hurt you enough when she was alive. You didn’t need to be dragged into her death. This is exactly what I was trying to save you from. Don’t you see?”
CHAPTER
FORTY
The conference room on the second floor of the Utica PD headquarters was surprisingly modern. Ellie, Rogan, and Sullivan sat elbow-to-elbow in front of a webcam. Behind them, an Oneida County ADA named Mike Siebecker was pacing. On the large screen on the opposite wall was an image of Max, appearing via video conference.
The detectives had dominated the conversation for the last forty-five minutes, detailing all available evidence involving all of the murders. Now it was time for the lawyers to talk through the legal issues.
Siebecker took the lead. “If you look only at our Utica victims, we basically have nothing except the cellmate saying Amaro quasi-confessed, which isn’t probable cause on its own. The only way to get to PC is to pull in evidence involving the city victim, Deborah Garner, where we’ve got the single-witness identification and the confession. It’s dicey, but if you add that evidence to Harris’s statement, I think I could get a judge here to sign an arrest warrant.”
“That was our thinking,” Max said. “At least we’d know Amaro was behind bars while we continued to investigate.”
“But here’s the problem,” Siebecker added. “The affirmative evidence against Amaro is already thin, and then you’ve got to take into account what I’ll call the negative evidence—the evidence that points to an alternative suspect.”
“The unidentified DNA on Donna Blank,” Max said.
“I have some thoughts on that,” Ellie said, raising a hand. “In talking to people who knew the victims, there’s reason to believe that Donna Blank didn’t fit the profile. She worked at strip clubs. Took tips. Probably crossed the line into tricking in the bathrooms and the parking lot, but she wasn’t a hard-core working girl like the other victims.”
Sullivan made a coughing sound on the other side of Rogan. At least he removed his plastic chew-stick from his mouth before speaking. “I think turning tricks in parking lots makes someone a working girl.”
“But she was at the fringe of that world.” Ellie considered throwing in the fact that Mona had told Sullivan herself that Donna didn’t fit the profile of the other victims, but she had promised Mona to leave her out of this. Instead, she said, “I would’ve thought you’d be in a position to know this personally. Donna’s mother told us she saw her daughter get in your car.” She couldn’t see Rogan’s face, but on the screen, she saw Max looking at her as if she had burped at the head table of the State Dining Room.
Sullivan’s fingertips pressed against the table. His voice sounded strained. “I don’t know why you would say that in the tone you just used, Detective, but Donna Blank’s sister happens to be one of my son’s closest and oldest friends. As a favor to the family, I reached out to Donna to encourage her to seek help for her drug problem, but I assure you, that’s the extent of my contact with her.”
Siebecker made a time-out sign with his hands. “It’s not entirely about the unidentified DNA. We also have the anonymous letter claiming that whoever killed the Utica victims murdered Brunswick. Normally, courts don’t give credence to anonymous tips, but whoever wrote that letter knew that Helen Brunswick’s limbs had been broken—information that hadn’t been released to the public. Not to mention Brunswick’s connection to the mental-health system here treating some extremely dangerous people at the same time those women were killed. Anthony Amaro has no known connection to that world, but we have one individual—Joseph Flaherty—who obviously had a negative experience with Dr. Brunswick, and who just happened to have turned himself in for civil commitment shortly after her murder.”
“We don’t have anything close to probable cause on Joseph,” Ellie said.
“Agreed,” Siebecker said. “But that’s not my point. Any evidence against a person who is not Anthony Amaro is essentially a subtraction from the quantum of evidence we have to get us to probable cause. So, as for positive evidence against Amaro, we barely have probable cause, and then we add the negative evidence, and, alas, I don’t think we’re there.”
Ellie looked to Max, hoping he’d find a way out of this mathematical analogy. But instead, she heard, “I have to say, I concur.”
Rogan looked exhausted again. “Enough with the positive and the negative evidence talk. I may not know Oneida County, but if it’s like any other place in this country, there’s some judge you can call to sign what needs to be signed. It’s about getting our hands on this guy again.”
“The problem with that,” Max said, “is: What happens when you get him? You might find evidence on him. Or he might confess. And we’ll lose all of it if we don’t actually have the probable cause. I hate it that this guy’s on the streets as much as anyone, but we’ve got to do this right. Shoddy police work is what put us here in the first place.”
She glanced at Rogan in her periphery, wondering if he was going to argue with that assessment. He glanced at her, clearly frustrated, but said nothing.
“So now what?” she asked.
Sullivan jumped in. “At least we know where to find Joseph. His commitment hold expired, and he’s back on his meds. He’s at his mother’s, so I’ll have my guys keep eyes on him. And we’ve got a BOLO out for Amaro and have guys looking—his old contacts, the motels, shelters. My guess is his attorneys have told him by now to lay low.”
“We should see what we can learn about Joseph’s recent mental state,” Ellie said. “And his whereabouts—whether he could have been in New York City when Helen Brunswick was killed. We could talk to his mother, maybe, as a starting point.”
“We can handle that,” Sullivan said. “The way she sees it, I was pretty sympathetic toward her son when he was fixated on me all those years ago.”
“And us?” Rogan asked. “What role does the fresh-look team play in all this?”
She could tell from Max’s forced smile that Rogan’s sarcasm wasn’t lost on him. “You’ll be on the ground
back here in the city; Sullivan will be in charge up there. It’s time for you guys to come home.”
Sullivan led the way out of the room, followed by Siebecker and Rogan. When she was alone in the conference room, she looked straight into the webcam. “This sucks, Max.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The whole purpose of the fresh look was to get a fresh look, right? But Sullivan’s entangled. He knew at least one of the victims. He buried the info from Amaro’s cellmate. He intimidated a woman who came forward to say that Donna Blank wasn’t like the other girls. And he seems intent on going after Joseph Flaherty, who was a teenager locked up in a psych ward when Donna Blank was killed. As far as I can tell, the only thing Flaherty’s guilty of is harassing a police officer who, oh yeah, just happens to be Will Sullivan.”
“We’ll talk it through together, okay? Come on home.”
She nodded, and he blew a kiss and clicked offline, leaving her alone in the room. She was about to walk out when she noticed the red plastic coffee stirrer on the conference table, flattened and gnawed by Sullivan’s nervous chewing.
She pulled a Kleenex from her shoulder bag and used it to scoop up the straw. She knew an analyst who would quietly do her the favor.
Couldn’t hurt to check.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
By the time Ellie put keys into her front door four hours later, she felt like she’d been on the road for a month. She let her gym bag fall to the floor.
Max appeared in the front hallway and handed her a highball glass full of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks.
“You are a god.” She took a big gulp and gave him an even bigger hug.
“You notice anything different about the apartment?”
The dining room table was set with two candles and a buffet of Chinese takeout. Then she realized this was the first time she’d walked into their home on a hot day and felt chilled.
“It’s freezing. And it’s wonderful.”
“I dropped the thermostat five degrees in your honor.”
At least Ellie had managed to solve one problem this week. She grabbed a spare rib from the spread and ate it with her fingers.
She was about to tell him about her pitstop at the crime lab. Michael Ma had agreed to test the coffee stirrer against the DNA beneath Donna Blank’s fingernails. He’d do it fast and quietly, without even asking where the plastic stick originated. But as she started to speak, she realized how ridiculous it would sound. She could make a good case that Will Sullivan was lazy, that he had been a stone wall in the investigation over and over again, that he was oddly complacent. But to go from being an incompetent cop to involvement in Donna Blank’s murder? Once she got the negative results back, she could set aside her nagging suspicions about Sullivan, and there would be no reason for anyone to know that she’d gone out on such a precarious limb.
She handed Max a set of chopsticks from the table. “Can we eat in front of the TV?”
“I’ve got last night’s Daily Show all cued up.”
“Perfection.”
By the time she went to bed, her belly was stuffed with egg rolls, scallion pancakes, and three helpings of double-cooked pork. She felt like she’d been home for days. She heard Max’s electric toothbrush running in the bathroom. She clicked off her nightstand lamp and turned his low, grateful now that he had insisted on getting the ones with dimmers. Resting her head, she realized how much smoother the sheets were here than in the Utica hotel, and how the pillow supported her neck perfectly.
As she closed her eyes, she reflected on how they had reached a new, slower place in the investigation. For days, they had been rushing from one urgent lead to the next, hoping that one would turn out to be the thing that opened the floodgates. But not every case had a breakthrough. There were no more obvious places to turn. They’d move on to the long shots. And they’d start taking new callouts.
What had Rogan said to her? We get through this case, then we go back to normal. At the time, they both believed they would identify whatever person or people killed Helen Brunswick, Deborah Garner, Stacy Myer, Donna Blank, Jennifer Bronson, Leticia Thomas, and Nicole Henning. They would get justice for those victims. They would get answers for their families.
But sometimes cases went cold. Once this one did, the fresh-look team would be disbanded. They wouldn’t quit immediately. They’d keep working for a few days, maybe even add more officers in a last-ditch surge of effort. But when the leads didn’t pan out and no new tips came in, the team would close up shop. Things would go back to normal for Ellie, with Rogan and with Max.
By the time she fell asleep, she was telling herself it wasn’t their fault: the mistakes had been made before she and Rogan had ever heard of Anthony Amaro. She was prepared to let the case go. Had she been able to admit it to herself, she was almost eager to move on.
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
For as long as Carrie could remember, she’d been working as much and as hard as possible. In school to get into the best college possible. At Cornell to maintain the minimum GPA for her scholarship. Back in Utica, waiting tables to help her mother keep the house after her father died. Back in school again—at Cortland State, CUNY Law, then Fordham—trying to prove she was still worth taking a chance on. At Russ Waterston, making up in hours and effort for the networking advantages her peers had over her.
Carrie had spent her entire life reaching for the next thing, but today her life was suddenly different. Today she opened her eyes, then closed them again, and did that several times over. By the time she got out of bed, the clock read two thirty-four and she had violated her mother’s motto of not losing an hour in the morning seven times over.
She kept forcing herself back into sleep for a reason: she didn’t have a job. She didn’t have work to do. And, worst of all, the confidence she used to have in her work was shaken. She had managed to help free Anthony Amaro but still had no idea who killed Donna and those other women. Under the circumstances, bed seemed like a sensible place to spend the day.
But this was also the first day she could remember when she had absolutely nothing scheduled. She had no assignment to complete, no goal to meet, no clock to watch. She was one of those New Yorkers Carrie always wondered about—picking up the morning paper in the late afternoon, strolling through the city streets in tennis shoes and shorts, sunglasses on head. She forced herself to leave the apartment to get coffee and a paper. Before she knew it, the errand turned into a trek down to the High Line, the elevated park just two miles from her that she’d been swearing to see for nearly three years.
On a different day, she would never have had her earbuds in as she crossed the street and entered the front door of her building. She would have checked the street before using her security key, searching for anyone who gave her the heebie-jeebies. If anyone suddenly appeared behind her, she would have pretended to fumble with her mail or her phone, any excuse to insist that they go ahead of her. She would have done all those things, because Carrie had grown up in a city where women were murdered, and she had internalized certain routines.
But today wasn’t every other day. Today was the day she blissfully crossed the street, and entered the building, and took the stairs, all while Prince’s “When Doves Cry” blasted in her ears. Today was the day she failed to notice that someone had been standing down the hall, waiting for her arrival, watching her as she inserted her key into the door.
Today was the day she didn’t worry about a thing, not until she felt the first crack on the side of her head.
As she fell forward, she covered her face and skull with her arms.
Another blow, this time to a kidney. Her right arm jerked automatically to her side. She felt another blow to the head, then another, and another. It felt like a new lifetime, while thoughts of her old one flashed before her on a screen. She felt herself falling into blackness. She was getting cold. Then she felt a warm bath comforting her.
She hadn’t seen her assai
lant. She had no idea what motivated her murder. But she knew she was being punished for helping Anthony Amaro regain his freedom.
PART FOUR
THE LAST GASP
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
Ellie knew the rhythms of an important murder investigation. When she walked into 1 Police Plaza, she could immediately connect the energy of the environment to what she knew to be true about the case itself. It was big—too big for the squad room at her home base of the 13th Precinct.
Until today, the so-called fresh-look team had been spare. Ellie, Rogan, Max. Supplements in Utica. Now forty officers flooded a room crammed with white boards and computers. They were working every possible angle that could be explored without setting foot in Oneida County. About a quarter of the team was rehashing background information from Utica: some reviewing the old evidence; some digging up information about the reliability of Amaro’s former cellmate, Robert Harris; some concentrating on Helen Brunswick’s former patient, Joseph Flaherty. Then there was the focus on the victims: most homicides were committed by an acquaintance. Even fetish-driven serial killers often targeted a victim or two with a personal connection. Then there were the officers taxed with tracing the mysterious communications that had been coming in to law enforcement—the initial tip tying Helen Brunswick’s murder to Anthony Amaro; the e-mail leading them to Robert Harris; and the telephone message that was supposedly from Anthony Amaro’s foster sister.
Anyone could look at the number of bodies involved in this effort—the ringing phones, the movement from one side of the room to the other, the pandemonium—and see that this was important. But when Ellie felt this kind of energy, she had a different take. This was the moment when an institution ramped up, but when Ellie began to shut down. This was the last gasp. The investigation was intense, but ultimately narrow. This was the surge. This was the moment when the people in charge committed every possible resource, in the hope that something would break, and in the certainty that the effort could be held up as proof down the road that they’d done everything possible before giving up.
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