Chapter Sixty-Three
Missing Persons Unit
November 28, 12.05 p.m.
A hooker somehow disappeared and her kids had half starved in a project that housed 3,500 people. So much for neighbours looking out for each other. So much for equal opportunity policing. The neighbours even said they heard crying and screaming from the girls, but that was normal in the projects. No need to interfere and find yourself facing a teenager with a gun. Shut your own door and block your ears.
Tom stared again at the image of Lottie Bixley’s face. For four days, her children suffered on their own. For those four days, she was a missing person, not a murder victim. He logged on to the National Missing Persons database. He was looking for something. Anything at all. He typed in Lottie’s details. Within about half an hour, he’d found another missing girl called Elisa Dale. He opened her details.
Female, 110 pounds, Caucasian, nineteen years old, brown hair. Suspected prostitute.
He scrolled down to her address and considered it for a moment. The date was June 14, 2006. Nearly eighteen months before Lottie went missing. He looked at the brief description. She went out to work the street and never returned. That was it. No investigation. Case closed.
Tom’s curiosity clicked into gear. He narrowed his search location and dates and began to find other young women.
Within an hour, Harper had pulled together three photographs of young women in front of him. Two Caucasian, one Hispanic, all in their late teens or early twenties, all of a slight build. All hookers living in East Harlem. All missing without a trace in the last twenty-four months.
None of these cases ever reached the homicide squad. None were investigated. Hookers were not considered high priority. Somebody somewhere just wrote a report and filed it. What the hell had happened to all these young women?
Harper wanted to push on with this missing persons thing further. He got a map up on the internet and started to pinpoint the addresses and the points at which the three girls went missing. He looked at the pattern in front of him. If these were homicides and not missing persons, this would be a major investigation. Maybe something went wrong with Lottie. Maybe her killer never intended to dump her. A body causes problems.
Deep into the database, staring at face after face of lost people, Harper felt suddenly very lonely. But something was bothering him. Missing hookers got shit while the rich girls had hundreds of detectives assigned to their cases. No one gave a damn about the girls up in the projects who made up the numbers.
Women who just seemed to disappear.
It took hours of going through the files to try to piece the jigsaw together. He had all the last known locations of five missing hookers across several different precincts going back four years pinned on a map. The missing hookers obviously congregated around the areas of poverty and prostitution. They couldn’t all be just missing, could they? These girls were disappearing. Slowly, silently, invisibly — one after the other. And no one gave a damn. Deep in his gut was the churning feeling that this was somehow connected to the American Devil. The single cherry blossom petal was enough to keep him going. Harper clicked on to open cases. The face of Lucy James stared out at him. He read the report.
Lucy James was not a hooker, but she had gone missing in Central Park late at night, just like Lottie Bixley. Tom read the details. She had been with her boyfriend in the park. Then she had been abducted. He read the boyfriend’s statement. He said that they were out walking. She ran away from him into the bushes as some kind of tease and she was snatched. There was blood on the ground. Then something sprang out at Harper and he felt a rush of adrenalin. He re-read the boyfriend’s statement and there it was.
‘Along East Drive, we passed a guy sitting on a bench. He was a regular guy, tall, strong-looking, wearing a red rollneck and a black coat. He had a suitcase by his side. I remember that because Lucy asked him if he was going on vacation.’
Harper called Eddie directly. His voice sounded wired. ‘Eddie, did you pull that guy from the 7-Eleven yet?’
‘Just about to. Why?’
‘I was looking into the missing persons angle. I found a young college girl who’s disappeared. Last seen two nights ago. She’s not a hooker like Lottie, but she went missing in Central Park.’
‘Not from Harlem?’ asked Eddie
‘This girl was near enough to Lottie’s last known location down on East Drive.’
‘Any details? What’s her name?’
‘Lucy James.’
‘So what’s the connection?’
‘The boyfriend saw a guy sitting on a bench just before Lucy disappeared. And guess what? He was wearing a red rollneck and had a suitcase with him. That spark any memories for you?’
‘A fucking suitcase! He said he kept his laundry in it. He was also the last person to see Lottie alive.’
‘The scene at Lottie’s dump site had wheel marks,’ said Harper. ‘About the width of a suitcase. That’s how he did it! How he moves these girls from one place to another without being seen. He puts the girls in a suitcase. Shit. A fucking suitcase.’
‘I’ll call the team,’ said Eddie. ‘Maybe it’ll cross-reference with some sightings we’ve had for the American Devil. We’ve got thousands and thousands of statements but we weren’t ever looking for a suitcase.’
‘We’ve got to get back to the 7-Eleven, right now.’
Harper grabbed his coat and made for the door.
Chapter Sixty-Four
7-Eleven
November 28, 12.45 p.m.
The wipers on Eddie’s red Pontiac struggled against a scuzzy grey sleet as they drove at high speed up to Harlem through the post-vacation traffic. Shoppers laden with bags from the pre-Christmas sales hunkered down into their coats, carelessly stepping into the stream of cars and cabs as they hurried to the subway.
Up in East Harlem, Eddie slammed the car hard against the kerbstone and both cops rushed out towards the 7-Eleven. The door jangled and hit a wire stack of magazines but no one appeared at the counter. ‘Police! Can we get someone out here now!’
Benny Marconi, in a different coloured Hawaiian shirt and khaki pants, appeared from the back, pushing a kickstool with his toe.
‘What’s the fucking noise for?’
‘We got to talk to you, now,’ said Harper. ‘Your man, the big guy who works here, where is he?’
The short guy stood up and looked them up and down. ‘Not again, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s out. What’s it to you?’
‘Listen, Mr Marconi, we’re investigating a homicide case and we need to speak to the big guy. Where is he?’
Benny laughed out loud. ‘Are you kidding me? Fuck you! We don’t hear nothing out here. We don’t know nothing. All I know is he’s not here.’
‘I promise we ain’t kidding you,’ said Eddie, moving up tight to the storekeeper. ‘I can have twenty detectives tear the store to pieces, close you down for so long you ain’t never gonna open again.’
‘You think the fucking shakedown is gonna work on me? Forget it. Show me a warrant. You ain’t got a thing. Go find him yourself.’
Harper turned quickly. ‘What name does he go by here?’
