“Besides, what happens if you actually find the guy? What happens when a man who kills women for sport gets an eyeful of you? Have you thought about that?”
She hadn’t, but she also did not want to. She had imagined her father’s death too many times. She had pictured him, forced at gunpoint behind the wheel of his car for his own staged suicide. Had he known he was about to die? Had he thought of his family in those last seconds? She did not want to imagine herself like that — outmatched, resigned, absolutely finished.
She sipped her drink in silence, and Jess stopped fighting her. Since Ellie had followed her brother up to New York nearly ten years ago, they had learned to simply accept each other.
“So how’s Mom?” Jess finally asked.
“Wondering what you’re up to, as always.”
“And the case against the city?”
“Cluster fuck, as usual. The attorney’s not getting anywhere, and Summer and the WPD are both still saying there were only the eight victims.”
“The Wichita Police are the same bozos who insisted he stopped at six kills all those years ago. Now they say it’s eight because he confessed to two more. They never would have known about those if that arrogant prick hadn’t given them all the information himself. What makes them so sure he isn’t still playing games with them? I’m sure he gets off knowing that he’s got one more kill in his back pocket they don’t know about. A cop, to boot.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Jess. I’m just telling you what I know.”
After the Wichita police finally arrested William Summer, the man formerly known only as the College Hill Strangler, Ellie had immediately retained yet another attorney to represent her mother in yet another claim against the city for her father’s pension. For a year and a half, the attorney had been fighting the city for access to the evidence collected against Summer. He had also been fighting the state for access to Summer himself. But until they found proof tying Summer to her father’s death, Jerry Hatcher remained a suicide, and the contrary suspicions carried by his family for the past decade and a half remained exactly that. Ellie hated the word
closure
, but she had to hope that an answer about her father’s death might snap her mother out of her limbo of grief.
“I’m heading home. Want to come back with me to call Mom?”
“There’s an open mic night at The Charleston in Williamsburg.”
“And a ten-minute phone call to Mom will keep you from playing?”
“No, it’ll put me in a serious funk and screw up the rest of my night. I’ll pass.”
Part of Ellie wanted to do the same. But while Jess did what he wanted, Ellie did what she thought she was supposed to do. It had always been that way in the Hatcher family. Ellie swallowed down the rest of her drink, then left enough money with Josie to cover a few more rounds of her brother’s bourbon.
10
JESS HAD SAID HER LIFE WAS EMPTY EXCEPT FOR HER JOB. THE
accusation was unfair. Her job was part of her life. It would be like saying Jess’s life was empty without his music, or that a mother’s life was empty without her children. Remove the things that matter, and any life looks empty.
Jess of all people knew how important her work was. It was precisely because the job was part of her identity that Ellie no longer lived with Bill. Despite what Jess thought, Bill wasn’t a bad guy. She’d met him, ironically enough, at one of Jess’s gigs in the West Village. Bill was immediately smitten and, after five months, persuaded Ellie to leave her rented room behind and move in with him. He was a hard worker, an investment banker who liked to enjoy the little time off that he had. And what he enjoyed the most — flattering enough — was having Ellie at his side, giving him her full attention. Bill assumed she’d happily leave the job once he offered to take care of her. He assumed that was what every woman wanted. He was envious, in fact, that women enjoyed that as a lifestyle option.
But, despite his every assurance that she didn’t need to work, Ellie insisted that she did. After a few months of wrangling, she realized Bill was spending more than a few nights after work having cocktails with a woman in his marketing department. Knowing Bill, Ellie was sure it wasn’t a physical affair. But she could see the end coming, so she made way for Bill to have the kind of future he wanted — one that didn’t involve the NYPD. She told him she was moving out, and he didn’t try hard to stop her. That’s what convinced her it was never the real thing. It had been far too easy, for both of them, to leave.
In a switch of roles, Jess was the one who helped Ellie get settled after the breakup. He had an old girlfriend who was grateful for a watch-cop on her Lower East Side sofa for two weeks, and, before Ellie knew it, Jess had found her this sublet of a friend of a friend of a friend. Ellie suspected the original tenant was lying on a beach somewhere in Fiji, but as long as she had a place of her own, she wasn’t going to shed a tear for her landlord. It was a big step down from Bill’s Upper East Side junior four, but it was all hers, and she could afford it. Barely. It had taken several months and a few coats of paint, but the one-bedroom illegal sublet in Murray Hill finally felt like home.
She nestled herself onto her couch in front of the television, then muted the set and reached for the telephone, ready to get the nightly call to her mother out of the way.
“Hello?”
“Hey Mom. Sorry I’m a little late. I just wanted to say good night.”
“Were you working?” Roberta sounded happy, but artificially so, assisted no doubt by a little vodka. Ellie and Jess called it their mother’s nighttime voice. “Did you make a case on those forged theater tickets?”
“We’re still working on it. I just had some paperwork to take care of.”
“Your father used to always complain about the paperwork. Remember how he used to say if he had a donut for every piece of paper he generated in his career, he could feed every cop in America?”
“Did you hear anything else from the lawyer?” Ellie asked, hoping to cut off her mother’s muddled trip down memory lane.
“The city told him that Summer kept mementos from all the murders. That’s how they linked him to the cases they pinned on him. He also had photographs.”
“Did he tell them we already knew that?”
From the beginning, the College Hill Strangler had a fondness for sharing images of his crime scenes. In one letter mailed to the
Wichita Eagle
in 1981, he included a sketch of one of the murder scenes — so graphic and accurate that police speculated it was drawn from a photograph. After another the next year, he sent the police an actual photograph along with an audiotape of the victim struggling to breathe. For years, that package was the College Hill Strangler’s last known communication.
Then precisely twenty years later, a reporter at the city newspaper received an envelope containing a necklace and a Polaroid picture. The necklace was one police had been looking for since 1978 — stolen from the single mother who was the College Hill Strangler’s first victim. The picture was of the corpse of another woman, the victim of a still-unsolved murder in 1997. With hopes of revival, EMT’s had rushed her immediately from the bedroom where she was found strangled to the hospital where she died. Only her killer could have a photo of her body.
The College Hill Strangler was back. The anonymous mailing was his way of announcing that to the police. While the city was comforted by false theories of his death or incapacitation, he still lived among them, killing. Over the next eleven months, he would dole out six more envelopes of surprises — letters, drawings, even poems. His desire to gloat finally led to his own capture when an alert teenager jotted down the license plate number of a car peeling rubber as it sped away from the neighborhood mail drop.
“They’re trotting out the same old story,” Roberta said. “He was meticulous about his mementos and his diaries. They found evidence linking him to the eight named victims, and that’s all.”
“That’s bullshit,” Ellie said, quickly apologizing to her mother for the language. It would be just like Summer to gloat to the police about all his other killings, except for the one cop who almost caught him.
“Maybe you could help if you came down here,” Roberta offered. “I have a hard enough time on my own without all of this going on.”
“Mom, I told you I’d come down once there was a reason to. I’ll take as much time off as I have to. If we get access to the evidence, I’ll go through it myself, piece by piece. Or if they’d just let me talk to him—”
“You know I don’t like that idea.”
Ellie recognized that she fell directly in the center of William Summer’s preference zone. Right age. Clean-cut. Warm personality. She was convinced that if she had him in the box, he would be unable to resist the temptation to torture her the only way he could — mentally. He would try to torture her by describing what he had done to her father.
“Let’s not fight about this, Mom. I promise you: When the time comes, I’ll fly to Wichita, and we’ll figure out where to go from there — together.”
There was a brief silence on the line, then Roberta asked about Jess. “I haven’t heard from him lately.”
“He’s great. He dropped by here earlier. He wanted to talk to you, but his band had a big gig tonight.”
“Good for them. I keep telling the folks around here about Dog Park, but so far no one’s heard of them. You know how it takes forever for anything big to make it to Kansas.”
Ellie told her mother she loved her before she said good night. She made a point of telling her mother she missed her. Roberta said she loved and missed Ellie too, then hung up sounding as lonely and helpless as she always did at the end of their calls.
THE WHISKEY WAS still working on Ellie’s brain an hour later, along with images of her mother, Amy Davis’s damaged neck, and the empty look in her parents’ eyes as Flann helplessly handed them their daughter’s cat. Her mind’s eye leaped back to a memory of her father, sitting alone at the garage sale desk in the basement, surrounded by crime photos, rereading old police reports he had memorized eight times over. Hanging at the center of his gruesome montage was the smiling face of an impish-looking blond woman named Janice Beale.
Detective Jerry Hatcher had been most shaken by that one. By the time Beale was killed, two weeks before Christmas, 1984, the College Hill Strangler had already killed five people. Five people. Three days. Six years. Ellie’s father could never shake the guilt that perhaps Beale’s death could have been prevented. If they had put the pieces together, if they had warned the public, maybe she would have been spared. That was the thought Ellie’s father could never elude.
Like Amy Davis, Janice Beale was single, young, lived alone — a death by strangling. Ellie shook the comparison from her head. She was not going to let this happen. She was not in her father’s shoes. Amy Davis had been dead for less than a week. This was not a cold case. If she and Flann worked hard enough, it never would be.
With sleep futile, she climbed out of her bed and reread all of the e-mails Amy had exchanged on FirstDate. She picked the three men who were most interesting. Nothing dangerous. Nothing threatening. Just a hunch about these three. Then she signed up for FirstDate, calling herself “DB990.” DB for Date Bait, followed by her badge number. She wrote a profile along the lines of others on the site and uploaded a dark, grainy photograph that Jess had snapped of her with his cell phone one night at the Blue Note. She sent “flirts” to the three men she had selected. Clicking on another user’s flirt command didn’t require her to say anything. It just meant she was interested. And she was.
When she was finished online, she called the precinct and asked a clerk in the records department to run Christine Conboy, the redheaded receptionist at FirstDate. Conboy had a few old driving offenses on Long Island and a current phone number in Queens. Ellie checked the clock and saw it was past eleven, but she dialed the number anyway. A friendly voice said hello.
“Christine? This is Detective Ellie Hatcher. We met this morning?”
“Um, yeah?”
“I was hoping you could help me with something. I have a—”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you. The company says that any communications from law enforcement are supposed to go to the CEO.”
“The company says? You mean Mark Stern announced this today after we left?” Ellie took the silence on the other end of the line as confirmation. “Just hear me out, okay? Your boss will never know.”
“Can I trust you on that?”
“Did I seem to be buddies with Mr. Stern?”
That got a laugh in response. “I have to say, he didn’t seem to be real fond of you.”
“Well, don’t tell him, but the feeling’s mutual. You, on the other hand, seemed to actually care that we’re trying to catch someone who killed two women.”
“Of course I
care
. I just have no idea how I can possibly help you.”
“I have a list of profile names — people who were in touch with our two victims. I just need to know who they are. If we had that, we could start trying to put some pieces together.”
“I’m the receptionist. I don’t know how to get that information. Trust me, I wish I could.
I’m not just an employee, I’m a customer
.” Ellie got the reference to the old hair club ads, but the attempt at humor was awkward. “Really. We don’t have access to personal information.”
“But someone must. It’s stored in your database somewhere. It just needs to be turned over.”
There was a long pause. “I can’t help. I’m sorry.”
“Can I at least talk to you in person?” Saying no is always harder in person.
“If Stern sees me talking to you, I’ll lose my job. He’s a total control freak.”
“He won’t see us. I can come to your house. I can meet you on your break. Your lunch hour?”
“One o’clock. There’s a noodle place on Rector and Broadway. Much too lowbrow for the boss.”
Ellie took down the intersection and thanked Christine profusely. Then she climbed back into bed and shut her eyes. She left the bedroom door open so she could hear Jess come home. Once he did, she fell into a deep slumber.