Alafair Burke - Angel's Tip

“I’d feel a lot better if we’d found him by now,” Donovan said.

“Me too.”

She had finally convinced Rogan to go home shortly after midnight, with a promise that she’d call with any news. The more time that passed without any sign of Eckels, the less implausible of a suspect he seemed.

“If he weren’t a cop, you’d be yelling at me to wake up the most conservative judge I could find to sign a search warrant for his house.”

“I wouldn’t yell.”

“Beg?”

“In your dreams.” Ellie sat in her off-white armchair with her knees pulled up tight in front of her, wondering why she wasn’t pushing harder. If they were right, Eckels had already killed at least five women, two on her watch. If they were right, he could at that moment be selecting his next victim, or planning to come after Ellie directly.

But maybe they were wrong.

If they were wrong, and she led the charge to execute a search warrant at Dan Eckels’s house, her career would be over. Tomorrow it would be good-bye homicide unit. Within a year, she’d be chased out of the department altogether. Another cop could go gypsy, relocating to another city to start anew, but not her. She was Ellie Hatcher, that chick on Dateline and in People magazine whose whack job of a father offed himself with his service weapon.

Ellie trusted her gut. She trusted it so much that she’d kick down the door on Eckels’s house personally if her gut told her it was the right thing to do, damn the consequences.

But it wasn’t the devastating consequences of a mistake that had her tucked into a ball in her armchair. Her gut was telling her she was missing something. Her head knew the facts, but her instincts were telling her that there was another way of looking at them. Like a child’s blocks that could be formed into an infinite number of completed shapes, the facts would tell a different story if she could somehow rotate and rearrange them until they fell into the correct combination.

She just wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on Eckels. They had people watching his house. They had investigators quietly calling Eckels’s friends in the department to see where he might be-a girlfriend’s, a late-night poker game, some explanation for his disappearance after the mysterious drop-in at Ellie’s apartment.

Another hour, she thought. Ninety minutes. Two-thirty in the morning would be the tipping point. Two-thirty was late enough to confirm her suspicions. She still had ninety minutes to see what she was missing.

“Don’t you have an apartment of your own that you need to get to?” she said.

“I do in fact have an apartment, but I have absolutely no desire to go there right now. I’m staying here until you kick me out.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t need you to protect me. Look, big gun,” she said, pointing to the holster she’d tossed on her kitchen counter.

“If you think I want to be here so I can protect you, you have seriously overestimated my manliness. I’m a pencil-neck lawyer. You’re doing all the protecting tonight.”

“You can’t stay all night.” Somehow the words came out in a voice that suggested precisely the opposite. Max heard it, too.

“Don’t think of it as all night. Just until you kick me out. If morning stumbles along before then, so be it.”

“I’ve known you for all of three days.”

“Yeah, but think of how much time we’ve spent together.” He looked at his watch. “Like, fourteen hours, today alone. That pretty much makes this our third or fourth date.”

“A date administering polygraphs and figuring out if my lieutenant is trying to kill me.”

He rose from the couch and walked toward her. “Well, that’s just how I roll. A date with Max Donovan is always an adventure.”

She could tell he was at least as exhausted as she was, and he was forcing himself not to look worried. And in that moment, Ellie-who so often preferred to be alone-found herself happy he was there. Here was a man who might-maybe, possibly, one day-actually understand her.

When he knelt against her chair, she did not stop him. And when he leaned in to kiss her, she decided to stop thinking and to let things simply happen.

LIEUTENANT DAN ECKELS buttoned his trench coat as he walked through the marble-floored lobby of the Trump Place apartment complex, then climbed into his black Dodge Charger. He pulled onto the West Side Highway, feeling slightly less stressed than he had a few hours earlier. Marlene had that effect on him.

It had been four years since he’d met Marlene, and if someone had predicted then the odd relationship he shared with her today, he would have called the paramedics for a straitjacket.

He had busted the sleazeball who paid the rent on Marlene’s high-rise apartment right before he’d earned his white-shirt promotion. Precisely where Vinnie fell in the hierarchy of his crime family was still unclear in Eckels’s mind, but on that particular day, Eckels popped someone under Vinnie’s supervision for scalping counterfeit concert tickets.

When Eckels caught up with Vinnie at Elaine’s, his bleached-blond, fake-tittied goomah was on his arm. When Eckels pulled out the cuffs, Marlene offered to blow him in exchange for cutting Vinnie loose. Eckels was only one year divorced at the time, and he knew guys like Vinnie always managed to beat the rap anyway. Given his own stereotypes of men like Vinnie, Eckels would have expected him to give Marlene a good jab in the temple and to take him down just to save face. Instead, he’d remained at the table to finish his veal piccata while Marlene and Eckels took a little walk to the car.

Four years later, Vinnie didn’t seem to have a problem if Eckels occasionally dropped in on Marlene, as long as Eckels did him the occasional harmless favor in return: fixing tickets, running off a competitor, tracking down a plate-nothing that would get anyone hurt. The two men had an understanding.

Why Marlene put up with any of it remained a mystery. Vinnie took care of her, but she was in a 500-square-foot studio on a low floor just above the elevated portion of the West Side Highway. As far as Eckels could figure, all that mattered to Marlene was that she lived in a building bearing the Trump name.

He was careful not to take advantage of the arrangement. He dropped by Marlene’s maybe four times a year, and only on days when he really needed the escape. She had a way of calming him down.

Being with her tonight had helped, as he knew it would, but he was still anxious. The Daily Post was running a story tomorrow morning tying the Chelsea Hart murder to four others. The department would be going into full-on task-force mode.

He had been so relieved when Jake Myers had come along. The asshole looked good for it, and the possibility of a connection between Chelsea Hart and those other girls floated away. But then Hatcher had marched into his office, ragging about those same old names again.

He didn’t have much time before his captain, or maybe even the assistant chief, started asking him the hard questions. He’d caught the Alice Butler case, the third case in the series, and had failed to see the pattern. That alone would only render him a mediocre detective. No one would have a hard time believing that. He knew he wasn’t the best cop. He’d gotten the promotion based almost entirely on his test scores, but he’d never commanded the respect of the men who worked for him, or above him, for that matter.

But when the department got around to its postmortem analysis, they’d be looking at more than shoddy police work. When Flann McIlroy had come to him three years ago with his wacky theory, Eckels had shut him down and ordered him to stop investigating the cold cases. Not that McIlroy would have ever obeyed an order, but others wouldn’t look at it that way. His biggest mistake by far, though, was failing to speak up when his own detectives caught the Chelsea Hart case.