Читать книгу City of Fear - Alafair Burke - Страница 10

Chapter Four

The jingling turned out to be a Gwen Stefani ring tone on the dead girl’s cell phone. The alarm had been set to go off at 5:32 a.m. Thirty-two minutes after Ellie woke up. One hour and twenty-eight minutes before she was due at the Thirteenth Precinct.

What had been the significance of that specific moment to this unnamed girl? It could have been her preferred time to get up on a Monday morning. Or maybe it was a reminder to go home on Sunday night. Time to take her medications, or walk her dog. Whatever the alarm’s original purpose, by 5:32 a.m., the girl was dead, and the sound’s only effect had been to draw the attention of three passing joggers to her corpse.

It would take Ellie’s partner at least twenty minutes to reach the scene from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. For now, she had to make sure his trip would not be wasted.

The uniform officer riding in the passenger seat exited the sector car first. He looked like a lot of new cops. Fit. Baby-faced. Enthusiastic. Short haired. Maybe in a different decade, he would have enlisted in the army. These days, he probably had a mother who stopped him. Now he was law enforcement.

He directed a flashlight at the dead girl. Ellie could tell from his reaction that this was his first body.

‘Oh, Jesus.’ He reached for his stomach on reflex.

‘All upchuckers, over there.’ Ellie directed the officer’s attention to Jess, who, as instructed, was standing well east of the crime scene, looking out at the river, taking deep breaths. ‘Detective Hatcher, Manhattan South homicide. I need your radio.’

Ellie had wrapped up one week in the homicide bureau, and so far all she’d done was help her new partner tie together loose ends on his old cases and play support for other teams while she supposedly ‘learned the ropes’. Now she’d practically stumbled over this poor girl’s body inside the Manhattan South borough. She was the first cop on the scene, and she was a homicide detective. If she couldn’t weasel her way onto this case, she didn’t deserve her new assignment.

The uniform looked at her, blinking rapidly. First a disfigured body, now a sweaty woman in a Pretenders T-shirt and sweatpants, demanding his radio.

‘But –’

The young officer’s partner found the words he’d apparently been searching for once she’d stepped from the driver’s side of the car. ‘I’ll confirm it,’ she said, reaching for the Vertex radio microphone clipped to the shoulder of her navy blue uniform. ‘And no one’s taking our radios. Sorry, ma’am.’

Ellie nodded. The woman was a good cop. Depending on what precincts she’d been working, this could easily be her first body as well, but she was cool. Cooler than her partner. Just a quick glance at the body, then a more careful monitoring of everyone at the scene. Three runners, pacing. The sweaty woman who wanted their radio. The tall guy, looking out of place by the water.

‘Make sure that guy’s not going anywhere,’ she said to her partner. She was definitely good. Of the people at the scene, Jess was the one who should have registered on a cop’s radar. And asking her partner to keep Jess company gave the obviously nervous young cop some distance from the body.

‘You’re right,’ Ellie said, holding up her palms. ‘Call it in. But tell them homicide’s already here. Shield 27990. Hatcher. They’ll have me down as Elsa.’

She listened as the officer radioed in the essentials. They were at East River Park, south of Houston, north of the tennis courts. They had a 10–29–1.

It was standard 10 code. A 10–29–1: 29 for a past crime, 1 for a homicide. Across the country, 10-codes were dying out in favor of so-called plain language. The Department of Homeland Security had gone so far as to force the NYPD to train its officers in the kind of plain English that was supposed to assist interagency communications in an emergency. Instead, the entire notion of an eight-hour training session on plain talk became just another opportunity for the NYPD to mock the feds.

‘We still need EMTs,’ the officer said. Emergency Medical Technicians would have been dispatched with the original 911 call, but these days ambulances were in higher demand and correspondingly slower to respond than law enforcement. The homicide call-out would now bring technicians from the crime scene unit and the medical examiner’s office. So much for solitude along the East River.

Ellie motioned the woman to speed it along. The officer confirmed Ellie’s badge number and notified the dispatcher that a homicide detective was already at the scene.

‘And tell them J. J. Rogan’s on the way too,’ Ellie added. ‘Jeffrey James Rogan, my partner. Tell them to put us in the system. No need to do a separate homicide call-out.’

Ellie nodded as the woman repeated the information. Then she went to check on Jess. ‘I see you met my brother,’ she said to the young male officer. ‘He’s not as dangerous as he looks.’

Jess cocked his thumb and forefinger toward the cop. ‘Turns out your compadre here is a certified Dog Park fan.’

Dog Park was Jess’s rock band. Their biggest gigs were at ten-table taverns in Williamsburg and the occasional open mic nights in Manhattan. To say that Dog Park was an up-and-coming band would be a serious demotion to those groups that were actually on the ladder to stardom.

‘I knew someone out there had to love them as much I do,’ Ellie said.

‘Yeah. Small world.’ The officer smiled with considerable enthusiasm. Jess was eating it up, but Ellie suspected that at least some of the officer’s excitement was attributable to his relief at having a subject of conversation other than the dead body he’d just seen.

She turned at the sound of an engine and saw a second blue-and-white arrive at the scene.

‘Would you mind giving my brother a ride home, uh, Officer Capra?’ Ellie asked, squinting at the officer’s name tag. ‘I think his heart’s had enough of a workout for the morning.’

‘Sure. No problem.’

‘He’ll give you my gear and a suitable change of clothes for you to bring back here, if that’s all right.’

‘Uh, yeah.’ Capra glanced at his partner, as if worried about her reaction. First he’d almost vomited on the body. Now he was being sent away on an errand.

‘I really need my gear,’ Ellie said, following his gaze. ‘I’ll make sure she knows I told you to go.’

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 every one of them, just like you told me. Will I really get my wish?

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.