home for Christmas break, he showed up at the mall where she was shopping. You can call her friend Suzanne Mouton to verify. She’ll tell you. The whole experience was just awful.”
Ellie realized that Evelyn’s story was going nowhere, but took down the number anyway because she understood why this was important to Amy’s mother. Evelyn wanted to talk about her daughter in a personal way. She wanted to tell the detectives about a time when she knew what her daughter’s fears were, when she was familiar even with the bad things her daughter did as a consequence. To feel close again, Evelyn had to go back to Amy’s high school years, when Amy had apparently permitted a troubled boy to alter her transcript so she could escape the bayou.
When his wife finished, Hampton Davis cleared his throat. “You’ll have to forgive us if we seem to dwell on the past,” he said, looking at Evelyn. “But the experience my wife’s talking about was a horrible one. I ultimately had to go to court for a restraining order. The boy was actually arrested after the incident at the mall, and then – well, let’s just say things got worse from there. Amy blamed herself for years.”
“Our point,” Evelyn insisted, “is that our daughter would not have agreed to go on dates with strangers.”
“I’m very sorry,” McIlroy said, “but we’ve confirmed that Amy did sign herself up for an account with this service. In fact, she had a date that very night with a man she’d met online.”
“Well, then, that’s the man you should be looking at,” Hampton insisted.
“That was one of the first things we did,” McIlroy said patiently. “We were able to confirm his alibi, but we’re continuing to do everything we can-”
“No,” Hampton said, slapping the table. “You’ll have to check him out again. I refuse to believe that Amy would agree to meet men this way.”
Ellie tried to help by explaining how common it was for women Amy’s age to use services like FirstDate, but her efforts only served to upset the couple further.
Hampton cut off the conversation abruptly. “Unless you require anything else of us, Detectives, we’ll thank you for your time and let you get back to Amy’s case.”
Ellie and McIlroy walked the Davises out, pausing briefly at the men’s locker room, from which McIlroy retrieved the makeshift carrier he had fashioned for Chowhound. As Ellie watched Hampton take the awkward cardboard box from McIlroy, she couldn’t help but feel that these people were owed something more.
She heard the words come out of her mouth before she’d decided to speak them. “We’re going to find him.”
JOHNNY’S BAR ON Greenwich Avenue is roughly the size of a typical suburban closet – the walk-in kind with enough room to accommodate the typical suburban wardrobe. In Greenwich Village, however, people are not typical, and Johnny’s Bar has just the right dimensions for a kick-ass watering hole.
Ellie wasn’t sure how she even knew the bar’s name. The sign out front read Bar. She arrived forty minutes after the time she told Jess to expect her. By her brother’s standards, that wasn’t the same as being forty minutes late. It meant Ellie would have to sit alone for another fifteen. But she’d learned over the years that she needed to be the one to arrive first. Jess couldn’t be relied upon to wait. Jess could not be relied upon at all.
The woman behind the bar was called Josie. Josie had long curly black hair, pulled into a giant floppy knot at the top of her head. She wore a black tank top and jeans, accessorized with tattoos and piercings. She managed to look comfortable perched on top of the counter, her feet resting on the bar. She argued with a regular about whether it was finally time for Steinbrenner to go. Johnny’s was the kind of place where people talked baseball even with snow on the ground.
It was also the kind of place where a bartender like Josie remembered an occasional customer like Ellie – as well as her drink.
“Johnny Walker, right?”
“Black. On the rocks.”
Josie scooted off the counter and reached for a bottle on the top shelf. “We don’t get too many people in here for the good stuff. Hey Frank, Hatcher here is a full-blown detective on the NYPD.”
“Prettiest cop I ever saw,” Frank grumbled, turning his attention to the television. A football game of some kind was playing.
“Your brother’s late again?” Josie was pouring.
“No, I’m early.” Josie turned back to the game, leaving Ellie alone with her thoughts after a long two days.
Ellie let the whiskey warm her chest and stomach, untangling the knots she’d felt since Evelyn and Hampton Davis arrived at the precinct. They were good people, but, like a lot of parents, they knew nothing about their adult child. They still saw her as a precocious little girl, an ingenue just out of college – not as a woman who was already lying about her age on an Internet dating site. They were naive enough to believe their daughter would be safe forever. They thought nothing evil could ever get to her – all because she learned a few lessons in caution from a bad ex-boyfriend after high school.
What the parents from Louisiana didn’t realize is that most women have a similar story somewhere in their past – a boyfriend who can’t let go, a classmate who sits too close, a coworker who insists despite all reason that he’s more than just a friend. Bumping into a creep early in life back in Louisiana simply made Amy Davis a little smarter, a little sooner. It didn’t make her safe. Nothing does.
But Ellie could identify with the Davises’ grief. Since she was fourteen years old, she had known how hard it could be to accept the death of a family member at the hands of a monster. For more than fifteen years, she lived with the belief that her father had been murdered, without possessing even an image of the face of the man she hated, let alone a suitable punishment. She had her theories – a white guy, probably in his early twenties for his first kill in 1978. Rigid. Ordered. Bossy, compensating for insecurities. A wannabe cop. One of her reasons for leaving Kansas was her inability to pass a man of a certain age and demeanor without wondering,
McIlroy had handled the parents the way a homicide detective should. He was compassionate but professional. He gave them the cat they had come for and made sure they knew the department was giving the case its highest attention. But Ellie had crossed a line when she spoke the words you were never supposed to utter:
But Ellie had no regrets, despite the assurances she handed to McIlroy. The Davises might not have believed it, and perhaps neither did McIlroy. Ellie, however, was sure of it. When she made that promise to Amy Davis’s parents, she made a promise to herself.
Ellie had just ordered a second Johnny Walker when Jess walked in. She and her brother had little in common. He was brunette, tall, and wiry – hard and dark against her soft and light. They often joked that the Wichita hospital had switched at least one of them at birth.
“Knocking them back again, baby sis?”
“You know me. I’ve got a problem with the booze.”
They both knew she didn’t. Jess might, but they rarely mentioned it. As much as they joked about the hospital switch, the one thing Jess and Ellie had in common was that they were clearly their parents’ children. Ellie looked like her mom and acted like her dad. The opposite was true of Jess, and Mom’s behavioral genes did not mix well with alcohol.
“You picking up the tab?”
“For a little while at least.” Ellie glanced at her watch.
“God bless the NYPD.” Jess asked Josie for a shot of bourbon with a bourbon chaser and took a seat next to Ellie.
“How’s life as a crime fighter?”
Ellie smiled at her brother. He was so predictable.
“What’s going on, Jess?”
“Nothing. I can’t get with my sister every once in a while for a drink and some chat?”
In addition to being predictable, Jess was also frustrating.
“We’ll chat after you tell me what’s up.”
“You still got that extra key?”
Ellie sighed heavily and shook her head. “What happened to your apartment?”
She used the second-person possessive pronoun loosely. Other than a couple of guitars, a pair of work boots,
