CHAPTER 39
ELLIE BYPASSED THE CROWD at the courthouse elevators and took the stairs to the trial unit on the seventh floor. She was still trying to catch her breath when the receptionist informed her that Mr. Knight was on the fifteenth floor in the Homicide Investigation Unit with ADA Donovan. This time, she opted for the elevator.
Her cell buzzed during the wait. According to the screen, it was Peter. Again. Add that to the call she’d received in the car, and this was now four calls before ten-thirty in the morning. If he didn’t at least leave a message soon, he was about two attempts short of a serious conversation about restraining orders.
Ellie checked in with a receptionist at the Homicide Investigation Unit and was led to a conference room, where she found Simon Knight and Max Donovan seated across from each other at a cherry-veneer table, Rogan leaning against the matching credenza next to them.
“Excellent timing,” Knight said. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with Celina Symanski. She has agreed to meet you and Rogan at her father’s house in an hour. We figured she’d be more likely to break than Rodriguez or Susan Parker. We’ll work our way through the chain from there.”
“Very good,” Ellie said.
“Your partner told us you had a family emergency. I hope everything is under control.”
Rogan let out a small cough, and Ellie immediately filled in the blanks. Rogan was supposed to have informed Knight and Donovan about the body found at Vibrations, but he had held back in the event that the new case had nothing to do with their investigation. As he’d said, “We don’t give so-called exculpatory evidence to prosecutors.”
She was done with that tactic. She’d withheld her suspicions long enough. McIlroy had been onto something three years ago when he pulled those cold case files. When Chelsea Hart had been murdered, even Bill Harrington from his Long Island living room had sensed there was a connection. And now Rachel Peck’s body had convinced her.
But she was not like McIlroy. She was not going to keep this to herself. She might actually get somewhere if she trusted others to help. Maybe if McIlroy had worked his theory with a partner, Chelsea Hart and Rachel Peck would still be alive.
“My family emergency was a call from my brother. They found a body last night where he works, at a bar off the West Side Highway. The woman’s name was Rachel Peck. She was last seen at a club in the Meatpacking District, just three blocks away from Pulse. Like Chelsea Hart, she was manually strangled. She also had the same kinds of cuts across her face, and the ME says the same knife could have been used on both girls.”
“What the hell are you getting at?” Knight said. “We just spent the last hour with your partner coming back to terms with our case against Jake Myers. You’re telling me we’ve got another body to look at?”
“Another four, actually. A detective I worked with on a special assignment, Flann McIlroy-”
“I knew McIlroy,” Knight said.
“A few years ago, Flann was looking at three cold cases. All young women. All killed after late nights out.” She went on to explain Flann’s theory that they were all connected by a single killer who collected the victims’ hair, as well as how Chelsea Hart and Rachel Peck fit into the same pattern.
“Why are we just hearing about this?”
Knight must have noticed the look exchanged between Ellie and Rogan. He also understood its significance. “Ah, I see. Another one of those situations where the police think it’s better not to let the DAs know too much.”
“It sounded far-fetched until this morning,” Ellie said. “Rachel Peck changes that. We’ve now got the three cold cases, plus two girls in the last week. Same pattern. Five girls, all within ten years.”
“And I still don’t see the pattern,” Rogan said. “The victims don’t fit the same socioeconomic profile. We’ve got three murders all within a few years of each other, then we have nothing for six straight years. Now we’ve got two bodies in one week? Why the break? And the pattern with the hair isn’t really a pattern. He chops off all of Chelsea Hart’s hair, but leaves Rachel Peck’s.”
“I agree with you that Chelsea wasn’t living on the fringe the way the other girls were. But, remember, she had a habit of making up stories about herself. If she met someone at Luna, she could have made herself sound more like the other victims. And if whoever she met that night realized that Jordan McLaughlin might have caught him in the background of the picture taken at the bar, that would explain the very uncomfortable coincidence of her phone being stolen by a man who just happened to get killed himself the very next day.”
She had to back up to fill Knight and Donovan in on Darrell Washington’s murder and the discovery of merchandise in his apartment that was purchased with Jordan’s stolen credit card. She could tell they were having a hard time processing all of the new information.
“As for the hair, if he’s a fetishist, it’s not the process of cutting the hair that might be important to him. It’s having the hair itself after the girls are dead. It’s about having a souvenir. And look at the patterns within the patterns. The first of all the killings was Lucy Feeney. Her hair was hacked off, just like Chelsea Hart. The next was Robbie Harrington, where he cut only the bangs, just like Rachel Peck. The next was Alice Butler, where he may have somehow collected her hair after she had it cut at the hairdresser’s, or maybe he only snipped a few pieces. But, each time, he was more subtle as he gained more control, trying to obscure the similarities. Now, he reemerges, and follows the same pattern.”
“So why does he reemerge, as you put it?” Donovan asked. There was no skepticism in his tone, but Ellie wondered whether his formal demeanor was a sign of disappointment in her.
“Maybe he was out of state. Maybe in prison for something else. But there’s another possibility, and this really is where I’m afraid I may sound insane. This is my first week in the homicide unit. I got that assignment after working an extremely high-profile investigation with Flann McIlroy two months ago-his last case, as we all know.”
Their eyes were all on her. They were following her but had no idea where she was taking them.
“I’m the one who found Chelsea Hart. She was on my regular running path. The alarm on her cell phone was set to go off right around the time I usually pass that spot. Rachel Peck was left where my brother works. Take a look at the incisions on Rachel Peck’s forehead.” She dropped a printout of the photograph she’d snapped at the ME’s office on the conference room table. “Am I crazy?”
“Are those your initials?” Donovan asked.
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
Rogan exhaled loudly.
“And look at Rachel’s hair. There’s a picture of me from when I was ten years old where my hair looks just like that. It was on Dateline. It was in People magazine. I’m more than a little embarrassed by the number of people who’ve seen me with precisely this hairstyle.”
Rogan cut in. “We’ve got about half an hour before we’re supposed to meet Celina Symanski in Queens. Did you forget that we have evidence proving that Jake Myers bribed a man to give us a false confession? We have Jake Myers’s DNA on the victim. We know for a fact who killed Chelsea Hart.”
“Or else Jake Myers is innocent but wasn’t so confident he’d get acquitted,” Ellie said.
“You two are making my head hurt,” Knight said. “I’m trying to process the implications of what you’re saying, Hatcher. If we’ve got a serial on our hands, it’s someone with a beef against you?”