financial records and telephone logs while Rogan was at the courthouse briefing Judge Bandon.
Ellie looked up to see Lieutenant Robin Tucker standing next to her desk, hands on hips in a tailored white shirt and black pantsuit.
“Rogan’s not back yet?”
Ellie glanced at the readout on her desk phone. Ten-fifteen. Rogan was supposed to meet Max in the judge’s chambers at nine.
“Should be done soon,” she said.
“Good. Call him. You two are up.” She handed Ellie a piece of paper with an address on it. East Fourteenth Street. Somewhere near Union Square Park.
Ellie scanned the squad room and saw several other teams of detectives working away in paired sets of desks.
“Rogan and I were hoping to take a new look at where we are on the Mancini case.”
“I told you two you’re not protected. New callouts just like everyone else.”
Ellie scouted out the squad room again, this time less subtly. “I’m not sure when Rogan will be done, Lou.”
“You’re a big girl, Hatcher. Your partner will find you soon enough. Now scoot. Your body’s a dead college girl. Right up your alley. Who knows? If she’s from Indiana, you might just earn yourself another medal.”
Her lieutenant’s quip referred to the murder last spring of a mid-western college student. The case had earned Ellie a Police Combat Cross for what the commissioner had called her “extraordinary heroism while engaged in personal combat with an armed adversary under circumstances of imminent personal hazard to life.” At the ceremony, Ellie had known the commissioner was simply reading the standard language that defined the award itself, but she had committed the words to memory anyway. They provided a palatable description of that case’s unflinching violence, both in the killer and ultimately in Ellie when she had taken his life. Robin Tucker could mock the recognition if she wanted, but Ellie knew that the finest thing she’d ever done in her life was to bring some measure of justice to that Indiana family.
The address that Tucker had handed her turned out to be on the southwest corner of Union Square Park. Ellie approached the address from the east, hit her dashboard emergency lights to flip a mid-block U-turn, and then pulled the Crown Vic in front of a fire hydrant on Fourteenth Street. Around the corner on University Place, she saw three patrol cars, an ambulance, another unmarked fleet vehicle, and the medical examiner’s van. The gang was all there.
The apartment building itself was a new condo, erected like so much new construction on top of a bank branch. On the other side of double glass doors off of University, she spotted a young Asian patrol officer with a crew cut inside the tiny lobby, his gaze apparently fixated on the abstract painting that filled the wall opposite the building’s elevator. She pulled on one of the doors. It was locked, but the sound of her attempt caught the patrol officer’s attention, and he pushed the door open for her.
Ellie flipped opened the badge holder clipped to her waist. “Apartment 4C?”
With a silent nod, he pressed the call button. She stepped inside and watched the digital readout track her trip to the fourth floor. The quiet of the elevator was immediately disrupted when the doors parted.
“God damn it, how the fuck did the EMTs wheel the other girl out of here?”
Ellie turned to see a short, heavyset man with a dark mustache and thick neck struggling with a gurney in the narrow hallway. She quickly counted four apartment doors—three closed, one held ajar by a uniformed patrol officer who was still staring at the black heavy-grade plastic body bag flopped on top of the aluminum gurney.
“Coming through,” the man said. Short of breath, he pushed the gurney farther toward Ellie and the elevator. “No one’s supposed to be up here anyway. Damn it,” he cried out to no one in particular, “someone call that stupid fuck in the lobby and remind him his one and only fucking job this morning is to serve as a human shield between these apartments and any more people to get in the way.”
“Looked like he was doing his job to me.” Ellie flashed her detective’s shield to the harried technician. “Besides, what’s the rush? Doesn’t look like you’ve got much hope of saving her.”
“Hey, sorry about that.” He offered a gloved hand on instinct. “Gabe Berry. ME’s office.”
She wrinkled her nose at the sight of his extended hand, and shook her head.
“Oh, yeah, right.” He wiped the perspiration from his brow with his palm. “You’re from Homicide?”
“Yep. You said the EMTs took a girl out of here already?”
“Yeah, now
“She supposed to make it?”
“No clue. From what I could see, there was big-time bleeding. She managed to crawl to the phone and dial 911, but it didn’t look so good. They found a pulse, but it was slow and weak. Could still be a DOA.”
“Anyone else we need to keep track of?”
“Nope. Just this unlucky one and the other less unlucky one.”
“And you were going to take my body before I got a look. How could you do that to me, Gabe?”
He shrugged. “A lot of detectives don’t give a sh—don’t care. We bag and tag. They get the details later from the ME.”
“Not me. I want to see her.”
Plenty of detectives were content to leave the technical aspects of a case—the inspection of the body, the crime scene analysis, the collection of physical evidence—to the teams of specialists assigned those tasks in any large police department. But seeing the victim’s body wasn’t just a matter of science. It was the first—and often, only—introduction to a human being whose life had been taken. This was Ellie’s chance to see the person before all color was gone. Before a forensic pathologist cut a Y incision into her torso, removed her internal organs, and sawed open her skull. While there was perhaps still some lingering sign of the spirit that had been lost.
“I want to see her,” she repeated.
“Here?” He looked at both sides of the narrow hallway. The idea of him navigating his broad body on either side of the gurney was clearly unimaginable.
She turned sideways and wiggled herself around the edge of the aluminum cart, careful not to place any pressure on the side of the body, and then pulled the bag’s zipper halfway down. She peeled apart the covering of the plastic to reveal the girl’s face.
She was young. Early twenties, max. Perhaps even still a teenager. Tucker had told Ellie to expect a college girl, so it made sense that she was young.
She was plain, at least in this condition. She had long, straight, blond hair, and Ellie could tell that this seemingly rushed technician had taken the time to arrange it around her shoulders, away from her eyes and face. Her skin was the color of Silly Putty, marred by streaks of dried red blood, but Ellie could tell that the girl’s complexion had been clear and clean. This was a girl who had taken care of herself. A few freckles darkened the bridge of her nose.
“Who is she?”
“Ask them.” Berry looked over his shoulder toward the apartment. Ellie noticed that the patrol officer who had been holding the door ajar was no longer there. “Like I said, I bag and tag. Some college chick, from what I heard.”
On another day, Ellie might have told the guy to show some respect—this woman didn’t deserve to be called “some chick.” But then Ellie looked at the girl’s shiny hair, so neatly straightened inside the body bag. Berry’s demeanor came with the territory, but he had treated this girl as a person, even in death.
She unzipped the bag farther to reveal more of the body. Ellie looked past the damage that had been inflicted by the knife, forcing herself to focus first on the person, not on the violence.
The girl wore a ribbed cotton V-neck T-shirt and a pair of dark blue jeans. She was in good shape, with slim arms and a flat stomach. The jeans hit her just beneath the belly button, not the kind of pelvis-revealing denim for which so many young, fit women opted these days.
No jewelry except for a dainty chain holding a tiny heart that rested just beneath her collarbone. It was the kind of necklace a girl this age would have been given by either a mother or a boyfriend. She made a mental note to find out which.
She scanned the body one more time and swallowed a lump forming in her throat. Someday she’d get past this. One day she might complete this ritual—this need to be introduced to the victim at the beginning of a new
