City of Fear

She touched Jess’s shoulder. ‘Get some sleep. I’ll call you later.’

Ellie looked at her watch. Five forty-five. Forty-five minutes since Jess threw shoes at her head. Thirty-four minutes since she made a mental note of her start time outside the apartment. Thirteen minutes since the first jingle of the Gwen Stefani ring tone.

She looked at the girl, abandoned and exposed against a pile of construction debris. If Ellie had kept on jogging, this would be someone else’s case. Someone else could deliver the news to the family. Someone else could offer their anemic reassurances that they were doing all they could to find out who’d done this to their daughter. But she had stopped. She had made the patrol officer use her name on the radio. This was her case now. This girl was her responsibility.

It was time to find out who she was.

Two hundred feet away, on the other side of East River Drive, a blue Ford Taurus was parked outside an apartment building on Mangin Street. The man at the wheel watched as a second patrol car arrived, followed by an ambulance with lights and sirens. Two patrol cars carrying four uniform officers had all arrived before the ambulance. He found that ironic. Good thing the girl was beyond saving.

The first of the patrol cars to have arrived left the park and turned north on the FDR. One cop up front. Civilian male in back, no cuffs. Everyone else remained at the scene for now. He wanted to stay and watch, but knew they’d be canvassing the neighborhood soon.

He turned the key in the ignition. The digital clock on his dash read 5:46. He adjusted the channel on his satellite radio. Fourteen minutes until Howard Stern.

At 5:48 a.m., twenty-two miles east in Mineola, Long Island, Bill Harrington’s eyes shot open when his newspaper carrier missed the porch once again, thumping the shutter outside his bedroom window. His body felt clammy. He kicked the quilt away to the side of the bed and welcomed the slight chill on his bare legs.

He had been dreaming of Robbie.

The dream began at the Alcoa plant outside Pittsburgh, a place he hadn’t set foot in since Penny insisted that they retire to Long Island five years ago. But he had worked in that plant five days a week for twenty-five years of his life – the majority of them happy – melting and pouring steel castings. In his dream, when he walked into the familiar employees’ break room, he found himself instead at the Harrington family’s old kitchen table.

It was Robbie’s sixth birthday. Jenna was only twelve at the time, but she’d insisted on baking the cake with only minimal assistance from her mother. The cake was lopsided, lumpy, and topped with a bizarre shade of green frosting, but Robbie hadn’t seemed to notice.

There she was, propped up on her knees on the vinyl padding of the kitchen chair, elbows on the table, her blond hair held back by a pink paper birthday-girl tiara, eagerly staring at the six burning candles while Bill, Penny, and Jenna drew out the final line of the birthday song to prolong Robbie’s excitement. Bill had smiled in his sleep when Robbie clenched her eyes shut, took that enormous breath, and whispered it cautiously across the tips of each candle. I did it, Daddy. I got everyone of them, just like you told me. Will I really get mywish?

You’ll have to wait to find out, Robbie. But, remember,don’t tell anyone.

In Bill’s dream, Robbie had crawled down from her chair and walked out of the kitchen into what had moments earlier been, in his mind, the Alcoa plant. Bill followed her, longing for more time, but it was too late. He found her as he’d last seen her nearly eight years ago – naked on a stainless steel gurney, draped with a white sheet.

All these years later, Bill still found himself thinking about his younger daughter. How often, he’d never bothered counting; at least once a day, certainly; usually more. And, just as he had in the very beginning, when Penny was still with him and Jenna still lived nearby, Bill occasionally woke from dreams that gave way to nightmares.

But it had been a long time since Bill Harrington had been visited by such vivid memories of Robbie.

Chapter Five (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf)

Ellie was still in her T-shirt and sweatpants when J. J. Rogan pulled up in a white Crown Vic, hopped the curb off the FDR, and claimed a patch of dirt as his parking spot.

As she walked toward her partner, she cursed the young Officer Capra for not yet having returned from what should have been a quick errand. Her mind flashed to an image of her brother showing off a guitar riff to his newest fan while she worked a crime scene in her dirty running gear.

Her self-consciousness only heightened as Rogan stepped out of the car. As usual, he was dressed to the nines. Today’s ensemble consisted of a three-button black suit, well-starched steel gray shirt, and a purple tie with small white dots. Two days earlier, she’d seen the label on a jacket he’d thrown on the back of his chair. Canali. About two grand. She assumed this one ran about the same.

Ellie hadn’t figured out how her new partner could afford the wardrobe – or whatever other, less obvious indulgences he might have – but she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he worked off-duty as a model. He was average height, but with a solid frame, probably just shy of six feet and at least two hundred pounds. Dark mocha skin. Smooth bald head. Really good smile.

In short, J. J. Rogan was at the top of the bell curve for looks.

And apparently that fact wasn’t lost on the almost entirely male squad of homicide detectives at the Thirteenth Precinct. Nor had it escaped their attention that Ellie wasn’t half bad herself. Ellie had already overheard another detective referring to them by a team nickname: Hotchick and Tubbs. She assumed that with time they’d conjure up something more clever, but the general theme had been established.

‘Barely six a.m., Hatcher. You know this shit should have been someone else’s call-out.’

‘You’re telling me that if you were first at a scene, you’d wait for someone else to catch the case?’

She couldn’t tell whether Rogan was satisfied with her response or was simply moving on to the business at hand, but he made a beeline to the construction site. A crime scene analyst was still cordoning off the area with yellow police tape.

Rogan winced at the sight of the body. ‘I guess someone meant business. Where are we?’

‘No official word from the ME, but based on the swelling in her face and eyes, my guess is she died from the strangling.’

Rogan nodded his agreement and shone a flashlight across the body. ‘And the cuts were just for fun. Most of them look postmortem.’ Without a beating heart to move the body’s blood, stab wounds inflicted after death were dry and bloodless. The hatch marks in the victim’s skin had the telltale look of sliced Styrofoam. ‘Have you found ID yet?’

‘We found a purse, probably tossed over the fence, but no wallet, and no ID.’

‘What about her hair?’

‘Nothing yet. He either chopped it off before he brought her here, or carried it off with him – maybe kept it as a souvenir.’

Rogan was still taking in the full visual of the body. ‘Too healthy for a working girl. No track marks. Fresh pedicure. Matching lingerie.’

Ellie had made the same observations.

‘How old, do you think? You know that’s not my strong suit,’ Rogan said with a small smile. When he’d first met Ellie last week, he had volunteered that she looked a mere twenty years old, but then added that he could never tell with white people.

‘Early twenties, tops. She could even be a teenager.’

Rogan clicked his tongue against his teeth.

‘We pulled a cell phone from behind the body,’ Ellie said. ‘It must have fallen out when the guy dumped her, before he tossed her purse.’

‘So start dialing all her contacts. Let’s find out who this girl is.’

‘Easier said than done. There’s something wrong with the screen. The display kept cutting in and out when I was turning off the alarm. Now I can’t get any image at all. Nothing but black lines.’

Rogan took a look at the broken phone. ‘The same thing happened to me when I dropped my Motorola at the gym. That thing’s shot.’

‘I did, however, find this in her purse.’ Ellie held up a ziplock bag containing a white plastic card not much larger than a business card.

He smiled, registering the significance of the bag’s contents. ‘Now that narrows it down. You plan on staying in your sweaty clothes all day?’

As if on command, a marked car pulled up next to Rogan’s Crown Vic. Officer Capra stepped out, carrying a familiar blue backpack. She hoped Jess had remembered to pack her shield, Glock, and the necessary undergarments.

‘I’m ready when you are.’

The white plastic card was a hotel key emblazoned with a blue capital H surrounded by a curly Q.

‘We got three Hiltons in Manhattan,’ Rogan said. ‘Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and the Financial District. Try your luck.’

Ellie was wriggling out of her running clothes in the footwell of the backseat, trying not to think about the various forms of mucus that had been hurled and smeared against the upholstery since the car’s last disinfection.

‘Girls that age don’t stay near Wall Street.’

‘Unless they’re hookers,’ Rogan interjected.