212 LP: A Novel (27 page)

7:50 P.M.

“I
had a cruiser here five minutes ago. Where are they?” She felt the pressure of her fingers around the radio handset and forced herself to loosen her grip.

“It’s hopping out there tonight, Detective. There was a DV beef a half mile from your location. That car reported clear and caught it.”

“They weren’t clear. They were standby. I’ve got a missing person located. I’m going in.” She repeated Dillon’s address twice. “Suspect is Nick Dillon. Known to be armed. I need felony arrest backup.”

Using familiar radio 10-code, the dispatcher relayed the information and assured Ellie that officers were on their way.

Ellie pulled her car around the corner, stopping one house short of Dillon’s. Then she waited. She heard the dog barking again, but no sirens. She looked in her side-view mirror. No cruisers.

She imagined the tiny glimmer of hope Stacy must have clung to as she pressed the send button on the text message to Ellie. She saw that spark of hope fading away with each minute Stacy remained alone with Nick Dillon.

Still no sirens. Still no black-and-whites.

Her first homicide case had been on a special assignment with a detective who got himself killed checking out a suspect without
backup. But she’d saved another cop’s life and earned a Combat Cross by walking into an armed murderer’s house without a weapon. And even though the NYPD awarded her one of its highest honors for her work on that case, she knew in her heart that she could have stopped the blood spree even earlier if she had thrown out all the rules and followed her own instincts from the beginning.

This time, she wouldn’t hesitate.

She opened her purse, removed a L’Oréal powder compact, and slipped it into her pants pocket. Then she hopped out of the car, popped the trunk, and retrieved the standard black baton from the equipment trunk. She followed the path of her own footsteps on the bent blades of Dillon’s grass, across the front yard, along the side of the garage, around the corner to the back.

Behind the garage, she raised the baton with her right hand, shielding her eyes with her left. She waited in the silence until she heard the bark of the neighbor’s dog, then swung as hard as she could, hoping that the combination of the riled animal and the wall between the garage and the house would muffle the sound of the shattering glass. She used the baton to clear away the broken shards of glass from the frame and then threw the baton to the grass at her feet. She pulled off her jacket and tossed it across the threshold.

The fabric protecting her hands, she hoisted herself through the window, landing in a crouch on the concrete of the garage floor. She immediately reached for the butt of her Glock and twisted the gun free from her holster.

Holding her breath, she felt a bead of sweat form at her temple and creep slowly down her cheek, but she remained still, ready for Dillon to appear from the house to inspect the sound of the disruption.

Nothing.

The sound of the zippers on her ankle-length boots was deafening in the silence. She stepped out of them in her socks, remembering how she had removed these same boots at Sam Sparks’s apartment on the night Robert Mancini was killed. She tiptoed to the interior door and reached for the knob with her left hand, the Glock held firmly in the right. She turned the knob and allowed
herself to inhale as she felt the cylinder retract, grateful that Dillon, like most homeowners, had not bothered to lock the door between the garage and his house.

She pushed the door open slowly, inch by inch, and then stepped onto the slate tile floor of a mudroom. She saw two steps in front of her, leading to an empty kitchen. She pulled up a mental image of the exterior of the house: the picture window at the front porch probably led to a living room at the front of the house; the sliding glass doors in back must have been for a family room in the back. Given the size of the house’s footprint, Dillon probably had three bedrooms upstairs. Subterraneous windows around the property indicated a basement.

Dillon and Stacy could be anywhere.

She took one step up from the mudroom, preparing for the squeaks and creeks that might come with the transition from tile to hardwood. Silence. She took the second step with more confidence, swinging her Glock to the right at the turn from the kitchen into the living room. Still no sign of Dillon or Stacy.

She had reached a fork in the floor plan. To the right were the living room and a staircase leading from the front door to the second floor. Ahead of her, she saw the remainder of the kitchen, followed by a hallway to what she guessed was the family room.

She took three steps toward the front door when a sound stopped her frozen. Without context, she would have pictured an injured dog. A whimper. Desperation. Resignation. Stacy.

The noise was distant. She allowed herself to close her eyes. To close off all her senses as her mind replayed the sound. In front of her and to the left. And down. Beneath the floor. Muffled. In the basement.

She turned to the left, stepping carefully past the kitchen. A well-appointed sunken family room—sectional sofa, upholstered ottoman, plasma television over a fireplace—sat unoccupied at the back of the house. Still further, down the hall past the family room, was a door—not fully closed, not open, ajar just an inch. She knew it would lead to the basement.

She made her way down the hall until she stood just outside the cracked door. She heard voices.

“Just do it. Please, do it.” A whimper. Desperation. Resignation. Stacy.

“May 27. Two-one-two Lafayette. I set it up. Miranda was supposed to be the girl, just Mancini’s type. But it turns out she wasn’t the girl hiding in the bathroom after all. She called you to cover.”

“No.”

“Stop lying. Miranda withstood a lot more than this, but in the end, she couldn’t take anymore. She called you, Stacy Schecter, the ‘honest and attractive brunette.’ You were the one who was there.”

“No.”

“Admit you were there, and I’ll do it.”

“Fine, I was there.”

“Then tell me what you heard. Tell me.”

Silence. Then a whimper. “I don’t know. I told you. It was Heather. The girl on the news. Tanya Abbott.”

This time the sound wasn’t a whimper, but a wail.

“I was in Afghanistan, Stacy. I learned these moves from watching men trained by Al Qaeda. Men who worked for the Taliban. Stop lying.”

“I’m not lying.”

“You are saying that name because you’ve seen the missing girl on the news. Tanya Abbott’s picture has been plastered across the city all week.”

“I
swear.
It was her.”

Ellie pressed her back against the wall outside the door, trying to process the conversation. She’d been right. Dillon was trying to find the woman from the 212 that night. But he didn’t know it was Tanya Abbott. He’d started with Katie Battle. Katie had led him to Stacy. And now he was convinced that Stacy was lying because, as far as the public knew, Tanya Abbott was the girl who’d gone missing after her roommate was stabbed.

Ellie reached into her pocket for the compact and then used her index finger to slowly widen the crack in the basement door. She
crouched toward the floor and slipped the mirror into the crack above the stairs, adjusting the mirror to view the activity in the basement below.

The glass was tiny. Four inches at best. She made out isolated images, like the staccato flashes of a strobe light. She saw enough to know it was bad. Stacy on her side, her bent legs pulled behind her. Arms over her head. Her face against the concrete floor at Dillon’s feet. Dillon bent over her contorted body. And the whimpers.

Ellie was startled by a sound behind her. Her instincts pulled her to the right one hundred and eighty degrees, her Glock held steady in front of her. The garage door through which she’d entered pushed farther open.

She stepped to her right toward a closed door farther down the hallway and smelled the familiar scent of laundry. She held the mirror in front of her to watch the garage entrance.

But where she expected to see Sam Sparks stood her lieutenant, Robin Tucker, her own Glock at the ready.

Ellie slowly peered around the corner and, when she caught Tucker’s eye, raised her left index finger to her lips. Tucker nodded. Ellie watched as her lieutenant took one careful step after the next, making her way down the hall toward her. She pressed her back against the wall on the opposite side of the basement door. She was still catching her breath, but the two of them now had Dillon’s exit straddled.

Ellie glanced at her watch. Where was backup? And did she really want it after all? If they stormed the house now, Dillon might panic and take Stacy out immediately. Or they’d be looking at a hostage situation in which Dillon had nothing to lose and nothing to gain either.

The voices continued downstairs.

“I was
in
the NYPD, Stacy. And I still have sources. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I have a near, dear friend in the department who absolutely adores me. Tells me everything I need to know. If Tanya Abbott were the girl I was interested in, I think she would’ve mentioned it. Think of another story, Stacy.”

Ellie stole a glance at Tucker, who swallowed and blinked a couple of times before returning Ellie’s gaze. Based on that very brief change in her expression, Ellie guessed that something inside her lieutenant had broken as she realized the truth about her role in Nick Dillon’s life.

Her attention was pulled back to the basement by more sounds—sobs followed by a thud and then a moan.

“You might not care about this, Stacy, but I mean it when I say, I take no pleasure in this. I’m not some rapist or sadist or sex-crazed killer. All I want is information.”

She heard Stacy’s pained voice, but could not make out the words.

“I’m sorry. I don’t believe you. How about I show you what I can do with a pair of pliers? I’m walking out to the garage, and when I get back, you’re going to start telling me the truth.”

In the reflection of the mirror, she saw Dillon turn toward the staircase and tuck his handgun into his waistband. Ellie jerked her arm out of view and pulled her body farther from the basement door, waving two fingers at Tucker to indicate that she should reposition herself farther down the hallway. Tucker took two steps to her left and raised her eyebrows to signal she was ready.

She heard Dillon step onto the first stair. The stride of his feet against the steps continued unbroken. The basement door began to open. Dillon stepped into the hallway.

“Freeze,” she yelled. “Down on your knees. Hands up. Hands up.”

She’d replay the next milliseconds in her mind’s eye countless times. What had she seen? Had Dillon’s hands reached for his weapon? Had they reached over his head as she’d commanded? Had they moved at all? The subtle movements of a man’s body in less than a second’s time, when he was surprised to see her, and when she feared for her safety, could never fully be reconstructed.

She knew with certainty, however, what happened a second after Dillon first spotted her outside the doorway. She heard the blast of gunfire—two shots—and saw Dillon fall to his knees, red stains blossoming at his stomach and on the collar of his light blue dress shirt. She saw him look up to her in confusion as he fell to the ground.
And then she saw his eyes move from her to Robin Tucker, whose Glock was still raised, ready to fire again if necessary. Dillon’s own weapon was at his waistband. Ellie bent over his limp and bleeding body and removed it to be safe.

She heard the faint sound of multiple sirens in the distance.

“He reached for his gun,” Tucker said, reholstering her Glock. “Don’t look at me like that, Hatcher. He reached. You saw it. Didn’t you see it? Tell me you saw that. He would’ve killed us.”

Then came the first of the many times Ellie would try to replay that partial second—that tiny gap of time between the opening of the basement door and the sound of Tucker’s shots. Maybe Dillon had reached for his waist and Tucker simply had a better view from her position. Or maybe he hadn’t, but would have half a second later if Tucker hadn’t fired. All Ellie knew was that she hadn’t seen his hands move. She also knew that her beliefs about what she’d actually seen didn’t really matter.

Dillon was a killer. She, Tucker, and Stacy were alive. Ellie was raised by a cop. She knew how this worked. As far as the official record was concerned, Dillon had reached for his weapon. Tucker would say so. So would Ellie. And, from the looks of the blood beginning to pool on the floor beneath him, Dillon wouldn’t be around to give his side of the story.

Her lieutenant still seemed to be processing what she’d just done as Ellie stepped around Dillon’s body. “I was outside,” she said. “Down the street. Watching. I saw him come with her. I thought—I thought he was fooling around. And then the unis knocked and left. And then you showed up, ran off, and came back again. When I saw the broken window, I realized—Hatcher, what am I going to say?”

“He reached for his gun.”

“But I was here. At his house. I was
watching
him.”

Ellie was already taking the basement stairs two at a time. She could tell from the approaching sounds of sirens that backup would be there soon. “You were coming over to surprise him. It’s fine. Call dispatch,” she yelled. “Have them send two ambulances.”

Stacy let out a sob when she saw Ellie turn the corner toward her.

“Is he gone?”

Her words were strained as she struggled to control her breath. Her ankles and wrists were bound together at the small of her back in a complex tangle of black nylon rope. Ellie relieved some of the pressure from Stacy’s limbs by supporting the weight of her bent legs in her own hands.

“We need a knife. Tucker, can you hear me? Find a knife.”

Her lieutenant descended the stairs seconds later wielding a ten-inch chef’s knife. Stacy’s body stiffened at the sight.

“Shh,” Ellie said, reaching for Tucker’s extended hand. “It’s okay now. He’s dead.”

She sawed at the rope, freeing Stacy’s hands and feet. Stacy’s weight dropped limp against the concrete, and she began to cry.