Fortunately, there was no harm done if the game had to end early. The letter left in the library would ensure a front-page story the following morning about the FirstDate murders. And he knew precisely how to halt the investigation. He closed the laptop on his kitchen table and thought about what else he needed to bring with him. He was expected on City Island in two hours.
32
ELLIE MET PETER MORSE AT HALF KING, A PUB HE CHOSE IN Chelsea. He wore faded jeans, a long-sleeve black T-shirt, and a crumpled charcoal gray blazer that would have looked formal on another man, but worked just fine on Peter. He greeted her with a friendly kiss on the cheek, and Ellie caught a group of women two tables over taking notice. Peter had those kind of looks.
“Great place,” she offered.
“A writer friend of mine owns it. They’ve got a regular reading series, and, as you can probably tell, it’s a favorite place for writers to gather and look for inspiration.” Ellie noticed a few customers scribbling in open notebooks. “Me, I can only write in total silence. I come here to eat and to drink.”
“That makes it my kind of place.”
“I’m really glad you called, Ellie.” He emphasized the first syllable of her name.
“Me too,” she said, meaning it. It felt good to hear him use her real name.
“And with perfect timing. I just finished filing the article with my editor right before you called. I put the focus on the letter from the library. It’s the first time I’ve become a part of my own story, so it was tricky, but I think I got the tone right.”
“That’s good.”
“Of course, I couldn’t write the story without including a little bit of your own background. The parallels to the College Hill Strangler case were so obvious that the connection had to be explained. I hope it’s something you can live with.”
“I guess we’ll find out in the morning.”
“I thought about running it by you, but-”
“I wouldn’t even think of it,” Ellie said. “You’ve got your job, and getting prior permission from me isn’t part of it.”
“Thanks for understanding. I guess the same has to be true for you too – keeping your work life separate from the personal.”
“That’s right, so you better hope I don’t find that meth lab you’ve got stashed away in your bedroom closet.” His comment had been a clear invitation to discuss her reasons for trying to preempt a relationship between them, but she wasn’t ready for that conversation. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to talk about, in fact, and was second-guessing her decision to call him. She wanted to see him in part because she needed to be with someone with whom she would not –
“If it helps any, I turned it in with a blurred photograph of Enoch’s letter, instead of a picture of you. Hopefully the editor won’t make any changes.”
“I hope you didn’t make that decision just because of me.”
“Nah, a threatening letter from a sex-phobic religious zealot is much more ominous than a beautiful police officer. Macabre sells. I was thinking about following up with a story fleshing out the computer angle. Maybe interview some experts about how the killer might have been able to access the e-mail accounts of his victims.”
Ellie liked that angle. It wouldn’t involve any details of the actual case, and it had absolutely nothing to do with her. “I know just the guy for you. He used to work at FirstDate and knows a lot of stuff. Very helpful.” She fished around in her purse and found Jason Upton’s business card.
Peter fingered the edges of the card. “A guy who knows a lot of stuff, huh? Should I be worried about the competition?”
“Nope. He’s a little too Waspy for my taste.” The truth was that until she met Peter, she thought she went for preppy men.
“An upper-crust computer nerd?” Peter feigned skepticism.
“A rich kid with a hobby as a day job. And he likes
Peter thanked her and placed the card in his wallet, and Ellie took the opportunity to change the subject. “So what’s good here?” she asked, opening a menu.
“Ah, nice transition. So either you’re starving, or that’s a sign that we should declare your current case and my current story a conversational no-no.”
“Both actually, if that’s okay with you.”
“More than okay. And you can’t go wrong with the menu, but your first time here, I’d go with either the shepherd’s pie or the fish-and-chips.”
When the waiter came, Ellie ordered a Johnny Walker Black and shepherd’s pie. Peter opted for a pint of Guinness and fish-and-chips.
“So can I ask you how you wound up in New York from Wichita, Kansas, or will that inevitably lead to verboten subject matter?” he asked.
“That’s well within limits. I came here because I have a very funny and crazy and irresponsible big brother who dropped out of college so he could hit it big as a rock star. He’d call Mom and tell her he was opening up for big names at CBGB’s – as if she even knew what that was. But I knew my brother, you know? When it came time for me to decide what I wanted to do, my high school teachers laid it out for me: What’s it gonna be – KU, K. State, or WSU? I stuck it out at Wichita State for a couple of years but eventually it hit me: I’d only lived one place my entire life, and there was absolutely no reason for me to stay. My mom needed me, but most of what she worried about was my brother. So I finished the semester, then came up here.”
“And your mom’s still in Kansas?”
“Yep. I call her every night. Just spoke to her before coming here in fact.” Ellie had tried not to let her mother’s continued attempts to pull Ellie into a visit to Wichita get to her.
“She’s got a good daughter. You went to John Jay right away?”
The rhythm of the conversation should have been awkward. Here they were, having what was essentially a first date – at least for him to get to know the real her – but he already knew so much about her past, and they’d already been together physically. In a strange way that she didn’t understand, she felt completely at ease with him.
“No. I figured I’d get here, settle in, and apply to CUNY or something. I wanted to be a lawyer.”
“But then you realized you were carbon-based. Buh-dump-bum. Sorry, obligatory lawyer joke.”
“Thank you for that. So, yeah, I realized I was carbon-based, and I also realized I couldn’t afford to live here and pay for school. So I was waiting tables and hanging around with Jess’s crowd, and keeping his kind of hours, and I guess I realized I was a little more of a cop at heart than I realized. Like a hand-to-hand drug exchange would be going down in a club bathroom, and I’d notice in a way that most people wouldn’t. And I’d see all of these disturbing things every day on the street that would really eat at me. Then one night I saw a girl, way too young even to be out at that hour, wander off from Washington Square Park with some Wall Street cokehead after the bars closed, and I just wanted to stop him from even being near her.”
“Sure.”
“I even confronted the guy – like an idiot, you know? Like, ‘Hey, isn’t she a little young for you, buddy?’ He told me to mind my own business, and she swore she was eighteen. I couldn’t do anything about it. I just watched them walk away, knowing full well what was going on, knowing the kind of life that girl was going to have. That was the moment it all clicked for me. I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew I’d be good at it. I enrolled at John Jay the next morning.”
“It sounds more like you needed to do it.”
“I guess. In training, one of the sergeants told us that being a cop should be a calling. That if you see it as just a job, you may as well go sell RV’s or tennis rackets. Anyway, I’ve never regretted it.”
“Not even after days like today?”
