Alafair Burke - Angel's Tip

Up in the Boogie Down Bronx, police exchanged bullets with a car full of teenagers outside the Morris housing projects in a late-night shootout. One suspect was in custody, and police continued the search for four more.

Only two stories, then straight to commercials. A freckle-faced imp fed his oatmeal to the family DVD machine; it was time for a visit to the appliance store. He flipped to another network. A dog rubbed his backside on the carpet; time to buy rug cleaner. Flip. A smiling brunette trying to convince him he needed pore-cleansing facial strips.

Back to ABC.

One more advertisement-another canine, this time selling him on light beer-and then the talking heads returned. The attractive Latina woman on the right side of the screen broke the story:

It was supposed to be the spring break of a lifetime, the trip that a young midwestern woman would always remember. But after the body of an Indiana college student was found early this morning in Manhattan’s East River Park, the police are now searching for her killer.

Sources tell WABC that the victim is nineteen-year-old Chelsea Hart, a freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington. She was visiting New York City this week for spring break. Friends who accompanied Hart to a nightclub last night in the Meatpacking District say they tried to persuade her to leave earlier in the evening, but Hart chose to stay behind for one last drink. That decision proved deadly.

The frame cut to the face of a young woman with cropped black hair. The bottom of the television screen read, “Jordan McLaughlin, friend of victim.” A reporter held a WABC microphone below her chin. The man recognized the girl from the previous night. She’d been wearing a short yellow dress.

“All we heard before we came here was how the city had changed from the old days, how it was good for tourists now. That it was safe for us to come here alone. Now I wish we’d stayed home.”

The clip ended, and the attractive news anchor returned to the screen. “Police are still investigating. We’ll bring you more, right here at WABC, as the story unfolds.”

The gray-haired male anchor on the left side of the screen used the Indiana girl’s comment about good ol’ safe New York to segue into another crime story, this time a home invasion in Westchester.

The man flipped through the other networks, searching for additional reports about the early morning discovery of the dead body in East River Park. Nothing. Either the other stations were all finished with their coverage, or only the ABC affiliate had broken the story.

Chelsea Hart. A college student from Indiana. He thought about the driver’s license he’d grasped between his fingers only a few hours earlier on his living room floor. Jennifer Green. Date of birth in 1983.

So she had been from Indiana, but the license wasn’t real after all. She was only nineteen years old. Her name was not Jennifer Green. And she’d been a college student from Bloomington.

The realization that he’d been ignorant of these basic details about the girl struck him as bizarre. He was the one who’d slid off her tight black pants and seen the purple birthmark on her right hip, peeking out from beneath those silky bikini panties. He was the one who’d run his fingers through those long blond waves before cutting them off to take home with him. He was the one who’d felt the firmness of her veins beneath the soft pale skin around her throat.

A lizard appeared on the screen to push insurance. As he hit the mute button on the television, the man wished he’d had more time last night. He had rushed with Chelsea, formerly known as Jennifer Green. He would take more time with his next project, once he found her. To his surprise, he was already anticipating it.

He still needed to put in another couple of hours of work, but he was rested from the quick catnap he’d caught after his meeting. He would start looking tonight.

THE PERSPECTIVE OF the camera continually changed, but the images always came to her in black and white. Sometimes Ellie watched the scenes unfold through the eyes of the victims. On other nights, she was a neutral and omnipotent observer floating overhead.

This time, she was pushing open the unlatched heavy oak door of a prairie-style home. She walked through the living room, passing in front of a fireplace, and then turned into a long hallway that led to the bedrooms.

She found the boy’s body first, laid out on his twin bed with a plastic shopping bag over his head, a rope around his throat. His mother was in the master bathroom, blindfolded in the tub with a bandanna. Ellie knew that the woman had been tortured before being drowned-held repeatedly under water to the brink of suffocation, then revived, only to be submerged again.

As she descended the basement stairs, she tried to block the image that she knew would come next. William Summer had saved the twelve-year-old daughter for last.

Just as Ellie caught sight of the soiled rag next to the girl’s body, a rumbling sound pulled her away from the nightmare. She opened her eyes and remembered she was alone in her Murray Hill living room. According to her cable box, it was 9:58. She had dozed off watching a show about Dexter, a wily serial killer who targeted people who truly deserved to die for their own heinous wrongdoings. If only real murderers were so delightfully discriminating.

She grabbed her vibrating cell phone from the coffee table and flipped it open.

“Hatcher.”

“Morse.”

It was Peter. “Hey. I didn’t check the screen first.”

“Guess what I learned today?”

“What?” She smiled at the sight of the plush green frog heads springing from her toes. She had tried to find a way to leave behind the slippers her mother had purchased for her in Kansas, but she had to admit they were actually pretty cute.

“Writing the news all day straight, and then coming home to write some more, totally sucks.”

“Isn’t that pretty much what your life was like before you met me?”

“I suppose.”

“And while I was in Kansas?”

“And your point would be?”

“Write one more page and then go to sleep.”

“A page? Do you have any idea how long it takes me to write a page?”

“You write fast,” Ellie said. She had seen him hammer out articles as fast as he could type them.

“That’s when I’m Peter Morse, crime beat reporter for a tabloid that calls itself a newspaper. It’s different with my own stuff.”

“Fine. Write another paragraph and go to sleep.”

“I think I’m fried for the night. It didn’t help that I got stuck at work. WABC beat everyone to the punch on a body this morning at East River Park, so I had to stay and bang something out for tomorrow morning’s paper. Kittrie must think it’s going to be a big story, because he awoke from his deep slumber as an editor and insisted we work on the coverage as a team.”

George Kittrie was Peter’s editor, and, at least according to the stories Peter had a tendency to tell, he was about as fond of Peter as Lieutenant Eckels was of Ellie.

“You probably don’t want to know, but that’s actually my case.”

“So instead of scrambling for two hours at the paper trying to satisfy Kittrie, I could have just called you?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, come on. I could have at least weaseled my way into a little hint.”

“Nothing. Nada. I’m Fort Knox.”

“I know. You sure you don’t want company?”

“Two nights on our own. I told you.”

“You are such a cop.”

“Good night.”

“’Night, Detective.”

She rose from the sofa and cleared away the debris from her dinner, lamb rogan josh and samosas delivered from a neighborhood Indian joint. Her stomach still felt hot from the spicy brown sauce on the lamb dish, and it dawned on Ellie how acclimated she had become during her decade in New York to the consumption of foods whose ingredients were a complete mystery to her.