Rogan looked at his Cartier watch. “In an hour.”
“Fingers crossed, guys. And, Hatcher, no surprises.”
CHAPTER 26
RACHEL PECK HAD been forced to alter her usual writing routine. Today was the second of two days this week she’d agreed to switch shifts with Dan Field, the afternoon bartender. Dan’s request had been accompanied by an explanation that his agent had lined up afternoon auditions for him, but Rachel suspected it was just another ploy to get access to her more lucrative peak-hour tips and to stick her with the lunch crowd. Still, Dan was generally a nice guy, and she didn’t want to be seen as an inflexible bitch, so she’d made the swap.
Her usual routine was to sleep late, do some yoga, and then write until it was time to show up to the proverbial day job, which, in her case, was a night job. Her goal each day was eight hundred words, even if it sometimes meant gluing herself to her keyboard at 2:00 a.m. when she returned from the restaurant.
This morning, however, she’d set her alarm for eight and had skipped the morning yoga so she could work in a couple of hours of writing before covering Dan’s lunch shift.
Rachel was twenty-six years old and had already thought of herself as a writer for a decade. Her literary dabblings began even earlier, when, as a kid in Lewiston, Idaho, her only escape from a household dominated by her angry and possessive father was a spiral-bound journal.
The Reverend Elijah Peck had found himself a single father one night when Rachel was only seven years old. Rachel’s mother had run to the corner market for a quart of milk and never returned. Her one-way Greyhound ticket to Las Vegas turned up on the family Master-Card, but the reverend didn’t bother trying to chase her down.
Her father’s willingness to let go of the wife who had abandoned him did not, however, extend to the daughter. Rachel had begun running away when she was only thirteen. She hitched rides to Spokane, Missoula, Kennewick, Twin Falls, Seattle.
Elijah would track her down every time. The last time she’d been brought home by her father, he’d found her working at the door of a Portland strip joint, scantily clad and impersonating a hostess of legal age. He hauled her back to Lewiston and told her that if she didn’t stay put and complete her senior year, she’d be dead to him.
When she asked her father what he meant, he looked her straight in the eye and said, “I’ll deliver you home to the Lord myself before you set another harlot’s foot in a sinner shack like that.”
Rachel had never understood her father, but she knew him well enough to believe he just might follow through on his promise. For a full year, she stuck to his drill. No more missed classes, no hitchhiking. She even kept curfew. Then the Saturday before her high school graduation ceremony, she packed a bag, found the principal, and did what she needed to do to convince him to let her take her diploma away with her. She hadn’t heard from her father or Lewiston since.
For the first time in years, Rachel was thinking about the Reverend Elijah Peck. The yellowed pages of her old journals lay before her on the dining table she used for a desk. Her eyes were still wet from the intermittent tears that had formed as she’d read her own teenage words and relived all those same emotions.
She was always surprised at how the quotidian details of everyday life crept into her writing. The way a woman at the next table checked the coverage of her lipstick in the reflection of a coffee cup. The pug in her building who wore an argyle turtleneck. The taste of cigarettes and dark chocolate.
But this was the first time she had made a conscious decision to draw on her own biography. The characters were fictionalized, of course. The defiant teenager would be a boy who developed into a killer. The oppressive parent would be a mother whose law enforcement career-always so resented by her always-resentful son-would now become the one means of helping her child, if she chose to do so.
Rachel was in the middle of a pivotal scene between mother and son-the one where the detective finds critical evidence beneath her own roof, implicating her own son-when she caught a glimpse of the time on the lower right hand of her computer screen.
Ten-fifteen. Time to earn a paycheck.
Her fingers tapped away at the keyboard as quickly as she could force them, pulling all of the thoughts stacked in her short-term memory and throwing them onto the screen. Spelling and syntax be damned. As long as she could piece it all together when she returned tonight, she’d be fine.
CHAPTER 27
ROGAN HAD DRIVEN past Cooper Square and was on the Bowery by the time he permitted Ellie to speak.
“What I’ve been trying to say is that I’m sorry I didn’t give you advance warning. I tried, but you were in such a hurry-”
“So this shit is my fault?”
“No, of course not.”
Rogan shook his head and kept his eyes on the road as he changed lanes to pass a minivan with Virginia plates. “What are the chances you’re actually going to listen to Eckels and leave this shit alone?”
“Mmmm, thirty-five, forty percent?”
“Higher than I would’ve thought. All right. Lay it on me.”
Ellie mapped out all three cases for him. Robbie Harrington and her unlikely bangs. Alice Butler and her new haircut. And Lucy Feeney, whose hair had been hacked off just like Chelsea Hart’s. She pulled Feeney’s autopsy photograph from her bag, but Rogan didn’t bother to look at it.
“Like the Lou said, it’s all for the Cold Case Squad.”
This time, she held the ME’s photograph above the dash, forcing Rogan to see the resemblance. “J. J., it could be the same guy.”
“And what year did all this go down?” he asked, eyes back on the road.
“Three women, all killed between ’98 and ’02.”
“And how old was Jake Myers at the time?”
Myers was currently only twenty-five years old. “I know. I’ve done the math.”
“So then you know those cases can’t be connected to ours.”
“The problem is, I don’t know that. What I know is that if there is a connection, we might have jumped too soon with Jake Myers.”
“When a pretty white girl from Indiana gets sliced up like a roast beef, there’s no such thing as jumping too soon. We’ve got a good case, a thousand sets of eyes on us, and once that DNA match comes in, we’ll have it locked and loaded.”
“Unless we missed something, in which case it’s a hell of a lot better to figure that out now instead of in the middle of a trial. It really disturbs me that Eckels didn’t say anything earlier. He told us himself that McIlroy went to him about these cases three years ago, so he knew the theory was out there. Then we catch the Chelsea Hart case, and he doesn’t bother mentioning any of this?”
“Because Jake Myers is our guy, and he couldn’t have done any of those other girls.”
“But what about when we first caught the case? When we didn’t have a suspect yet? You’d think Eckels would have taken the time to say, Oh, yeah, by the way, there’s some old cases you might want to look at.”
“Except the cases don’t make a pattern, Hatcher. Killers don’t murder three girls within four years, then lay low for the next six.”
She gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look.
“Fine, with the exception of William Summer, killers don’t stay dormant for years on end. And you’re blowing this whole thing with the hair out of proportion. Cutting bangs on a victim, or snipping off a few pieces from a new hairdo? That sounds like a serious fetish. Hacking it all off with a knife is anger, or maybe destruction of physical evidence. It’s not the same. And Chelsea’s not like your victims. They were all pretty rough city chicks. Hard-knock-life, round-the-way girls, not wide-eyed college students from Indiana.”