Dead Connection (7 page)

9

THEY WERE GREETED AT THE PRECINCT BY A CIVILIAN AIDE,
probably just out of high school, holding a plastic cup of soda the size of a bucket.

“There’s a couple people waiting here to see Detective McIlroy. I think they’re your victim’s parents. Something about a cat?” He gestured to an attractive couple sitting quietly on a bench down the hall.

Hampton Davis was tall and tan, with every black hair combed neatly in place. His wife, Evelyn, was petite with a light brown, chin-length bob. They both wore suits — his navy, hers powder blue.

McIlroy handled the introductions. “Mr. and Mrs. Davis, I’m Flann McIlroy. We spoke on the phone this weekend. This is Detective Hatcher. She’s also working on your daughter’s case.”

McIlroy led Ellie and the couple to an interview room adjacent to the homicide bureau. The four of them waited in awkward silence to see who would speak first. When Flann finally offered his condolences, Ellie could tell that although he’d no doubt spoken some variant of the same words many times before, he was still uncomfortable with them. He appeared more at ease once he began laying out his theory that Amy’s murder may have been related to her use of an Internet dating site.

“There must be some mistake,” Hampton said. “Our daughter would never use a service like that. She was extremely cautious with men she didn’t know.”

“Amy
was
being cautious,” Ellie vouched. “The service she used is anonymous, and she was very careful not to give out her last name or address.”

Hampton shook his head. “If you found her listed with one of those companies, then someone else put her there. I’ve read stories about that. Some crazy person gets obsessed and wreaks havoc on a person’s life by posting all kinds of nonsense on the Internet.”

“Amy’s had problems like that before,” Evelyn interrupted. A northeasterner would have described the woman’s accent as southern, but having been raised in Kansas, Ellie knew that not all southern accents were identical. This woman’s cadence was new to Ellie — southern, but not in a way she’d heard before, almost with a touch of Brooklyn thrown in like a hint of cayenne pepper.

“Back in high school, a boy in town wouldn’t leave her alone. It went on for months. Don’t get me wrong. Amy brought a little of it on herself. I guess this boy changed some grades for her. She was under a lot of pressure. She really wanted to go out of state for college, somewhere nice. Somewhere away from home.”

Hampton placed a hand gently on her forearm. “Evelyn, the detectives don’t need to hear this right now.”

Evelyn gave her husband a firm look. “What I’m telling the detectives is that Amy learned an early lesson. This boy I’m talking about kept calling her and writing her letters, even after she left for Colby. Then when she came home for Christmas break, he showed up at the mall where she was shopping. You can call her friend Suzanne Mouton to verify. She’ll tell you. The whole experience was just awful.”

Ellie realized that Evelyn’s story was going nowhere, but took down the number anyway because she understood why this was important to Amy’s mother. Evelyn wanted to talk about her daughter in a personal way. She wanted to tell the detectives about a time when she knew what her daughter’s fears were, when she was familiar even with the bad things her daughter did as a consequence. To feel close again, Evelyn had to go back to Amy’s high school years, when Amy had apparently permitted a troubled boy to alter her transcript so she could escape the bayou.

When his wife finished, Hampton Davis cleared his throat. “You’ll have to forgive us if we seem to dwell on the past,” he said, looking at Evelyn. “But the experience my wife’s talking about was a horrible one. I ultimately had to go to court for a restraining order. The boy was actually arrested after the incident at the mall, and then — well, let’s just say things got worse from there. Amy blamed herself for years.”

“Our point,” Evelyn insisted, “is that our daughter would not have agreed to go on dates with strangers.”

“I’m very sorry,” McIlroy said, “but we’ve confirmed that Amy did sign herself up for an account with this service. In fact, she had a date that very night with a man she’d met online.”

“Well, then, that’s the man you should be looking at,” Hampton insisted.

“That was one of the first things we did,” McIlroy said patiently. “We were able to confirm his alibi, but we’re continuing to do everything we can—”

“No,” Hampton said, slapping the table. “You’ll have to check him out again. I refuse to believe that Amy would agree to meet men this way.”

Ellie tried to help by explaining how common it was for women Amy’s age to use services like FirstDate, but her efforts only served to upset the couple further.

Hampton cut off the conversation abruptly. “Unless you require anything else of us, Detectives, we’ll thank you for your time and let you get back to Amy’s case.”

Ellie and McIlroy walked the Davises out, pausing briefly at the men’s locker room, from which McIlroy retrieved the makeshift carrier he had fashioned for Chowhound. As Ellie watched Hampton take the awkward cardboard box from McIlroy, she couldn’t help but feel that these people were owed something more.

She heard the words come out of her mouth before she’d decided to speak them. “We’re going to find him.”

JOHNNY’S BAR ON Greenwich Avenue is roughly the size of a typical suburban closet — the walk-in kind with enough room to accommodate the typical suburban wardrobe. In Greenwich Village, however, people are not typical, and Johnny’s Bar has just the right dimensions for a kick-ass watering hole.

Ellie wasn’t sure how she even knew the bar’s name. The sign out front read Bar. She arrived forty minutes after the time she told Jess to expect her. By her brother’s standards, that wasn’t the same as being forty minutes late. It meant Ellie would have to sit alone for another fifteen. But she’d learned over the years that she needed to be the one to arrive first. Jess couldn’t be relied upon to wait. Jess could not be relied upon at all.

The woman behind the bar was called Josie. Josie had long curly black hair, pulled into a giant floppy knot at the top of her head. She wore a black tank top and jeans, accessorized with tattoos and piercings. She managed to look comfortable perched on top of the counter, her feet resting on the bar. She argued with a regular about whether it was finally time for Steinbrenner to go. Johnny’s was the kind of place where people talked baseball even with snow on the ground.

It was also the kind of place where a bartender like Josie remembered an occasional customer like Ellie — as well as her drink.

“Johnny Walker, right?”

“Black. On the rocks.”

Josie scooted off the counter and reached for a bottle on the top shelf. “We don’t get too many people in here for the good stuff. Hey Frank, Hatcher here is a full-blown detective on the NYPD.”

“Prettiest cop I ever saw,” Frank grumbled, turning his attention to the television. A football game of some kind was playing.

“Your brother’s late again?” Josie was pouring.

“No, I’m early.” Josie turned back to the game, leaving Ellie alone with her thoughts after a long two days.

Ellie let the whiskey warm her chest and stomach, untangling the knots she’d felt since Evelyn and Hampton Davis arrived at the precinct. They were good people, but, like a lot of parents, they knew nothing about their adult child. They still saw her as a precocious little girl, an ingenue just out of college — not as a woman who was already lying about her age on an Internet dating site. They were naive enough to believe their daughter would be safe forever. They thought nothing evil could ever get to her — all because she learned a few lessons in caution from a bad ex-boyfriend after high school.

What the parents from Louisiana didn’t realize is that most women have a similar story somewhere in their past — a boyfriend who can’t let go, a classmate who sits too close, a coworker who insists despite all reason that he’s more than just a friend. Bumping into a creep early in life back in Louisiana simply made Amy Davis a little smarter, a little sooner. It didn’t make her safe. Nothing does.

But Ellie could identify with the Davises’ grief. Since she was fourteen years old, she had known how hard it could be to accept the death of a family member at the hands of a monster. For more than fifteen years, she lived with the belief that her father had been murdered, without possessing even an image of the face of the man she hated, let alone a suitable punishment. She had her theories — a white guy, probably in his early twenties for his first kill in 1978. Rigid. Ordered. Bossy, compensating for insecurities. A wannabe cop. One of her reasons for leaving Kansas was her inability to pass a man of a certain age and demeanor without wondering,
Is that the man who shot my father
? To lose a child that way — she could not begin to imagine.

McIlroy had handled the parents the way a homicide detective should. He was compassionate but professional. He gave them the cat they had come for and made sure they knew the department was giving the case its highest attention. But Ellie had crossed a line when she spoke the words you were never supposed to utter:
We’re going to find him
. McIlroy wasn’t happy about it. He made that much clear after the Davises left.

But Ellie had no regrets, despite the assurances she handed to McIlroy. The Davises might not have believed it, and perhaps neither did McIlroy. Ellie, however, was sure of it. When she made that promise to Amy Davis’s parents, she made a promise to herself.

Ellie had just ordered a second Johnny Walker when Jess walked in. She and her brother had little in common. He was brunette, tall, and wiry — hard and dark against her soft and light. They often joked that the Wichita hospital had switched at least one of them at birth.

“Knocking them back again, baby sis?”

“You know me. I’ve got a problem with the booze.”

They both knew she didn’t. Jess might, but they rarely mentioned it. As much as they joked about the hospital switch, the one thing Jess and Ellie had in common was that they were clearly their parents’ children. Ellie looked like her mom and acted like her dad. The opposite was true of Jess, and Mom’s behavioral genes did not mix well with alcohol.

“You picking up the tab?”

“For a little while at least.” Ellie glanced at her watch.

“God bless the NYPD.” Jess asked Josie for a shot of bourbon with a bourbon chaser and took a seat next to Ellie.

“How’s life as a crime fighter?”

Ellie smiled at her brother. He was so predictable.

“What’s going on, Jess?”

“Nothing. I can’t get with my sister every once in a while for a drink and some chat?”

In addition to being predictable, Jess was also frustrating.

“We’ll chat after you tell me what’s up.”

“You still got that extra key?”

Ellie sighed heavily and shook her head. “What happened to your apartment?”

She used the second-person possessive pronoun loosely. Other than a couple of guitars, a pair of work boots, and a gym bag of clothes, very little in this world belonged to Jess Hatcher. The last she heard, though, Jess had a place to crash in Williamsburg.

“My buddy needed to find a roommate who actually paid some rent.”

“Funny how that works. And the job?” Against her better judgment, Ellie had helped Jess with yet another employment placement, this time as a short-order cook at a diner in the Garment District, not too far from the Midtown South precinct, where Ellie once worked a beat. The seventy-year-old Swede who ran the place always had a weakness for Ellie. Apparently not enough to hang on to the likes of Jess.

“The old man had a few too many morning shifts for me. It’s hard to fry up the bacon at six when you’re frying up a little rock and roll till four.” He threw in a little air guitar for comedic flair.

“It wouldn’t be that hard on you if you did your gig, went to work, then slept later.” Ellie fished the spare key from her purse. She always carried it when Jess asked to meet her.

“Chat time now?” Jess tucked the key in the front pocket of his blue jeans. He gave Ellie the same boyish smile she had been looking up to as long as she could remember. It was the grin of a bashful chipmunk, so out of place on Jess’s lined, unshaven face.

“I’ve got a murder case.”

The shy grin faded. “I thought you were ‘quite happy solving your everyday garden variety felonies.’”

It was the line she gave Jess and her mother whenever they worried that she didn’t have the psychological makeup to stick it out as a cop. For completely different reasons, it was also the line she used to give Bill, her ex-boyfriend, to settle his completely separate concerns. Bill wondered how long she was going to work her job. Her family wondered how long it would take before Ellie’s job started working her.

“I was happy. I
am
happy. But working a homicide — this is different. I stood yesterday in a woman’s apartment, reading her mail, smelling her clothing, touching the contents of her medicine cabinet, all the while knowing that someone out there killed her. And then her parents came to the precinct to pick up their daughter’s cat.”

“You met her parents?”

Ellie ignored the question. “Another woman died exactly one year earlier. There are some commonalities.”

“You’re working a
serial case
? Ever dawn on you that might not be the best idea?”

“I’ll be fine. This is important, Jess. Some guy is out there right now, picking his next victim.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to be the one to stop him. You really feel like going down that road?”

Ellie knew what road he was talking about. “I won’t be like that. You can be a good cop without cutting yourself off from every other part of life.”

“And exactly what else do you have going in your life right now, El? You dumped Bill a year ago and have no prospects in sight.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You know what I mean.” Jess gave her two months of healing time after she moved out of Bill’s apartment but had since been trying to throw Ellie back into the dating world. They both knew the efforts were ridiculous, since most of Jess’s friends had the kinds of backgrounds that could land her in the middle of an I.A. investigation. And never mind that Jess couldn’t commit to anyone other than his fellow band members.