Dead Connection Read online

  “Can you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Pandey?”

  Escaping the watchful eye of a suspect always helped Ellie collect her thoughts. She turned the facts over again in her mind as she paced the narrow hallway adjacent to the interview rooms. According to the car service’s dispatcher, Pandey had picked up his last scheduled fare from the Times Square Marriott at five in the morning and dropped her off at her Bronx apartment thirty minutes later. Pandey was late returning to the garage, then called in shortly after six fifteen, groggily reporting that he had just come to after the assault and robbery he suffered on the drive downtown. He was only missing the fifty bucks from that last fare, and he would have had to have knocked himself in the head to get it. Ellie had seen the bump. He wasn’t messing around.

  Looking at the old-fashioned, round clock that hung at the end of the hallway, Ellie evaluated her next move. She knew what her training detective would have said during her probation period. He would have told her to save her energy because this was how the system worked: An employee pilfers cash, then blames it on a robbery. The employer uses the police department as a bullshit detector by requiring a report. Sometimes the employee caves and retracts the allegation, afraid of getting in trouble for filing a false statement. More often, he calls his boss’s bluff, knowing the cops are too busy to pursue a robbery complaint with no leads. Ellie knew that a good, efficient detective — one who could prioritize her limited time in sensible ways — would act as a transcriber, file the report, and move on to the real work.

  Efficiency, however, had never been Ellie’s first priority. She knew that Pandey was lying, so that made him important — to her at least. She didn’t especially care about punishing the man. He seemed decent enough. What she needed was an explanation for why this decent-enough person would bother. Find the motive, her father used to say. Until she understood Pandey’s motive, this inconsequential robbery report would continue to nag at her.

  She was telling herself to defer to efficiency, just this once, when a uniformed officer informed her she had a visitor. A dark-haired, dark-skinned woman in a multicolored maternity sari was waiting down the hall near the entrance to the detective bureau. From the looks of her girth, the baby she carried in her stomach was just about done.

  “I’m here about my husband?” the woman explained. “Samir Pandey. I called his employer when he was late coming home. There has been a robbery?”

  “He’s fine,” Ellie said. “Just a little rattled. Nothing to worry about — especially when you’ve got enough to keep your mind on. When are you due?”

  “One week.” The woman beamed proudly. “A daughter.”

  “Well, congratulations. If you want to have a seat, your husband will be out shortly. We’re just about done with his report.”

  “Hatcher, aren’t you supposed to be in here?” Jenkins scrutinized her from the doorway of his office.

  “Just one more second, boss,” she said, smiling.

  It was more like ninety seconds. Ellie found a comfortable chair for Mrs. Pandey in the cramped waiting area, then stopped at her desk. A quick call to the car service’s dispatcher, followed by a few keystrokes on her computer, and she had her answer. She darted to the bureau’s communal printer, removed the spooling page that awaited her, and shook the printout excitedly as she headed back to the interview room.

  Pandey wasn’t just out the fifty bucks. He was also out forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes when his extrapregnant wife was waiting for him, wondering why he hadn’t come home. She knew Pandey’s reason for lying, and she had the piece of paper that would persuade him to come clean.

  The photograph of Sandra Carr, the woman whom Pandey had driven to the Bronx as his last fare, had been taken courtesy of the New York Police Department after Carr was busted for solicitation a year earlier. Pandey’s face fell when he saw the picture slip to the table from Ellie’s fingertips.

  “Forty-five minutes,” Ellie said to her robbery victim. “You were missing the cash from your fare and the next forty-five minutes.”

  “Please do not tell my wife,” he said. “It is our first child. I have never done such a thing until today. I almost made it. Just one more week for the baby, then the doctor says we must wait six weeks after that. When I went upstairs with the lady, I could not even—”

  Pandey pushed the photograph away, and Ellie thought she heard a sniffle. She understood why he was here. A few lies — even the self-inflicted head injury — were to this man a small price to pay to put this morning’s activities in the past.

  “Mr. Pandey, I think we can mark your report as unlikely to be solved if you can behave yourself for the next seven weeks. I hear you’ve got a little girl on the way.”

  The driver was still thanking Ellie as he walked out of the station with his wife.

  “HATCHER. GET YOUR ass in here.” Jenkins had stepped from his office doorway into the detectives’ room.

  “The interview went a little long, boss. Sorry.” Ellie followed Jenkins into his office and rested a hip against a two-drawer file cabinet.

  “Seems to happen to you a lot. You ought to be careful about that curiosity,” he warned. “You’re either going to wind up a hero, or dead.”

  “Or both.”

  “Yeah, well, either one’s a bitch.” Jenkins lowered his dense, muscular frame into his chair, working his jaw like he was still mulling something over. “We have a situation. And I’m not saying anything until you take a seat. You’ve got too much energy, Hatcher.”

  Ellie did as she was told, but Jenkins’s jaw was still grinding. The lieutenant did that a lot. Hatcher suspected he maintained that stoic facial expression and the close shave of his dark black skull for a reason. His look was unambiguously serious. Authoritative. One eyeful of him, and the largely white detectives he supervised knew he was the real deal. No handouts when it came to Jenkins. But Hatcher had realized about a month into the detective bureau that the movement of Jenkins’s jaw gave a hint at what went on beneath the hardened exterior. And now it was telling Ellie that he was bothered.

  Jenkins was bothered, and she was in his office. Sitting, not standing. Something was definitely up.

  “I got a call from a homicide detective this morning.”

  “Is everything all right?” She could hear the alarm in her voice. Ellie’s job had nothing to do with the homicide division. She’d made detective just thirteen months earlier and was lucky to work scams and robberies. The one and only time she’d received a surprise call from the police about a dead body, she had been fourteen years old, and the body had been her father’s.

  “I suppose that depends on what you mean by ‘all right.’ A detective over there has a couple of dead women on his hands and seems to think you can help figure out who might have put them there.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “No offense, but I was surprised too. Apparently someone’s got himself a theory and thinks you’re in a unique position to help him. You’ve got a special assignment.”

  “To homicide?”

  “Now don’t go getting that tone. It’s an assignment. Temporarily. You’ll help out as you can, and then you’ll come straight back here when you’re done playing with the big boys.”

  “Of course. It’s just temporary.”

  Jenkins looked through the window that divided him from the detectives, working his jaw. “You don’t want it to become more than that. No matter what they say, it can’t come easy. Not to me, and not to you. You better deserve it twice as much as they do. You get what you want too soon, and you won’t be seen as earning it.”

  Ellie knew precisely what he meant. She had made detective quicker than most, after four years on patrol, and the assignment had coincided with the wave of media attention thrown her way that year. She knew other cops speculated she got a leg up either because she was female, because of the press, or both.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you. I still don’t understand, though. Who’s the detective?” Not that it made a
difference. Ellie didn’t know anyone in homicide.

  “Flann McIlroy. You ever heard of him?”

  “By name, sure.” The truth was she usually heard Flann McIlroy referred to by a slightly different name. McIl-Mulder, as he was called, was a colorful subject of discussion — usually complaints — among other career detectives who resented the singular adoration he appeared to enjoy. In the case that sealed his status as a media darling, a clinical psychiatrist had been pulled from the elevator of her Central Park West building when it stopped at a floor that was supposedly closed for construction. She had been stabbed eighty-eight times. The M.E. couldn’t determine whether the rape came before, during, or after.

  “Well, apparently McIlroy thinks he knows something about you,” Jenkins said. “Face it. You’ve gotten more press lately than most of us experience in a career. What the hell that’s got to do with two bodies in New York is for you to figure out.”

  Ellie would have loved to explain that she did not want the attention. To start with, the news stories weren’t about her. They were about her father. No, not even. They were about the man her father had hunted — the man who may have killed him. She was a mere human-interest sideshow, the daughter who followed in her dead daddy’s footsteps, who still believed in him.

  Instead, she nodded silently. A homicide detective read about her and for some reason thought she could help him. Two dead women, and a role for her in the investigation. Only one explanation for this temporary assignment came to mind: The women were working girls, and the department needed a decoy. She had a sudden image of herself in a sequined tube top and capri pants, roaming Penn Station.

  She’d managed to avoid decoy work as a patrol officer, even though her male colleagues had always made a point of reminding her that she was an obvious candidate for a job in vice. She was thirty years old, but heard all the time that she looked younger. She had thick, shoulder-length honey blond hair and pool-blue eyes. Her five-foot-five frame was naturally curvy, but with some added muscles thanks to kickboxing and light weight training. Despite her current job, New Yorkers never seemed surprised when she confessed with embarrassment that she was once first runner-up in a Junior Miss Wichita beauty pageant. She’d been told a few times she was a real “Midwestern knockout.” For some reason, they always threw in that regional qualifier.

  She wasn’t doing tube tops, though. Spaghetti straps would have to suffice.

  Jenkins had a different kind of advice for her. “This won’t go over well with some people. McIlroy’s got favor with the higher-ups, but his own people? The people in his house? They won’t like this.”

  “From what I read about that psychiatrist case, the guy’s smart. Maybe that’ll be enough to protect me.”

  Ellie remembered the case from the news. The primary detectives focused on the building’s construction crew because the workers had access to the closed floor. McIlroy, on the other hand, got wrapped up in the fact that the murder was on the eighth floor, and the victim was stabbed eighty-eight times. He even studied photographs of the bloody smears of the crime scene until he was convinced they were shaped in a chain of number eights. The rest of the homicide task force wrote it off as another crazy McIl-Mulder theory, but McIlroy hit the neighborhood homeless shelters and found a paranoid schizophrenic who’d been treated by the victim two years earlier while he was on his meds. Off his meds, he’d been walking the streets on the Upper West Side mumbling to whoever’d listen about the number eight.

  Jenkins ran a palm over his head stubble. “I think some people would say he’s lucky. And they’d also say it was bad form, working another team’s case. But what really pissed the task force off were the department’s press releases. McIlroy looked like a lone hero.”

  “And we know how that must’ve gone over.” Ellie thought of the barbs about McIl-Mulder she’d overheard among older detectives. She wasn’t sure which seemed to bother them more — his supposedly half-baked theories or the astonishing coincidence that the press always seemed to have a heads-up on the inner workings of his investigations.

  Jenkins shrugged. “He’s still the favored boy there, at least with the brass. But he’s got a reputation — well, it sounds like you’ve heard about it. I could tell them I need you here. I can keep my own people when I need to.”

  “No, sir. If I can help there and come back when I’m through, that’s what I’d like to do.”

  “I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that you’d say precisely that.” He handed her a slip of paper with McIlroy’s name and an address scrawled on it. The tell in his jaw was gone. Ellie took it as a sign of something Jenkins would never say aloud — he had been worried about her ability to handle the scrutiny that would come with the assignment, but he no longer was.

  It took Ellie only ten minutes and one box to pack up her desk, and the box was only half full. A picture with her mom and brother taken two Thanksgivings ago back in Wichita, a handful of hair clips, her favorite water glass, a jar of Nutella, a spoon, a cigarette lighter, and the potpourri of pens, Post-its, Jolly Ranchers, and other crap that fell out of her top desk drawer. That was it. All she had gathered in thirteen months.

  And somehow those thirteen months had led her to a murder assignment.

  3

  ELLIE HATCHER NEVER THOUGHT SHE’D BE A COP. SURE, LIKE ANY little kid modeling herself after a parent, she’d thrown around the idea. But police officer had fallen somewhere on the list between fashion designer and astronaut. Then, after her father died, she believed she’d lost every positive feeling she had about law enforcement. Her father literally gave his life to the job, and it left his family with nothing. No money. No support. Not even answers about his death.

  It also left her without the luxury of dreams about her future. When her older brother, Jess, ran off to New York to become a rock star, Ellie and her mother had been on their own. Even if Ellie had been willing to leave as well, the scholarship money she earned in B-level beauty pageants fell far short of out-of-state tuition. That left Ellie as a part-time waitress and a part-time prelaw student at Wichita State University.

  She’d probably be a lawyer in Kansas now if it weren’t for Jess — or at least for her mother’s inability not to worry about his pattern of mixing alcohol (and most likely other substances) with a general penchant for recklessness. After two years of watching her mother age ten, Ellie realized the best thing she could do for her mother — and herself — was to leave Wichita to look after her brother.

  Then a strange thing happened. She fell in love — not with a man, but with New York City. Young people, living beyond their means in cramped apartments, walking to the corner deli for takeout — tiny specks moving intently, carving out their own patterns among the chaos. Life in the city was exciting and unpredictable, exactly the opposite of the endless enclaves of ranch homes she’d known as a child. She was turned down for every paralegal job she applied for, but she learned not to care. Waiting tables paid more anyway, at least on the good nights.

  Then a stranger thing happened. As is inevitable in any relationship, Ellie started to notice the darker side of the city she loved. Beneath the tall buildings, upscale boutiques, and bright lights lived signs of a seedier and more harsh New York. A woman with fading bruises, pausing discreetly at the garbage can outside of the bakery, eyeing the half-eaten croissant lying just under that discarded cigarette butt. A homeless man tucking himself more tightly beneath urine-soaked cardboard boxes, hoping to avoid a roust to the shelters that would not permit his one and only possession — the matted beagle snuggled into the crook of his knees. Too many men waiting at the Port Authority for the young girls who arrive from faraway towns with big dreams but nowhere to sleep.

  Ellie tried to look away — to ignore the signs like everyone else. But as she strived for blissful ignorance, the problems only grew more glaring. She realized that only one job would allow her to love this city the way she wanted to: She could be the person who stopped to help instead of looking
away. It took three years of part-time classes at John Jay, but she finally became a cop. Then after four years of hard work, she made detective. One serious boyfriend had come and gone along the way, but she still had New York. And she still had her job.

  Now that job was taking her to the Thirteenth Precinct, home of the Manhattan South Homicide Task Force, a boxy six-story building on East Twenty-first Street between Second and Third avenues. At the front desk she asked one of a handful of uniformed officers for Flann McIlroy, and he escorted her to the task force offices on the third floor.

  “Fourth desk back, on the right,” the officer instructed, pointing across a room crammed with desks, shelves of notebooks, and men. The male-to-female ratio among the detectives here was even higher than what she was used to at Midtown North.

  Walking the gauntlet. That’s how it felt. Eyes intentionally followed Ellie and her half-filled brown cardboard box. The eyes’ owners exchanged knowing smiles. Each whisper grew bolder than the last. That must be McIl-Mulder’s Date Bait. Another said something about Scully being a blond. And having a box. A big box.

  Ellie pretended not to hear their remarks or notice their lingering glances. In a way, she appreciated them — or at least what they represented. Offensive jokes, lewd gestures, and the open resentment of outsiders often defined the working atmosphere of cops — at least for those who were not yet a part of it. But the veneer served an important purpose. Reinforced daily in small ways such as these, it protected the bonds that lay beneath the thin but often impenetrable cover.

  On this specific occasion, the jabs were aimed at her, and she understood why. She’d suffer through until the comments had served their purpose — a purpose that would ultimately benefit her, once these men came to realize, as others had before, that Ellie was no creampuff.

  At the fourth desk back on the right sat a man Ellie thought she recognized from various departmental press conferences. He didn’t fit Ellie’s stereotype of a pseudocelebrity law enforcement stud. The NYPD had bred its fair share, and they usually fell into one of two molds — the good-looking buff Italian, or the good-looking buff Irishman. Different coloring, distinguishable jawlines, but the looks were always off the charts. Flann McIlroy, by contrast, resembled an older version of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. He was not unattractive, but he had the look of a child star, decades later — in his forties, but forever destined to resemble a fourteen-year-old redhead with a gap in his teeth.