All Day and a Night (26 page)

“Then why didn’t you say something? I thought this was supposed to be a
we
thing? Joseph Flaherty obsessed over me for a few years solid for no reason at all.”

“So how come you didn’t pursue charges against him? According to the reports, it was your neighbors who always called.” She could tell from the expression on Rogan’s face that he was regretting having left her alone so long.

“It got to the point that he was like a raccoon under the porch, except I’m not allowed to plant poison in a trap. It seems to me that you missed the main point: Joseph never tried to harm me, but maybe Brunswick had an instinct about him that she couldn’t really put her finger on. The only other patient she ever called about probably would’ve turned into Jeffrey Dahmer if a well-placed car accident hadn’t taken him out first.”

“We ruled out Flaherty for a reason,” Ellie said. “He was committed to a psych ward at Cedar Ridge when at least one of the victims was killed.”

“Well, here’s the problem with your logic. I saw that same information. But because I’m from here, and you’re not, I happen to know that half the staff at Cedar Ridge in the 1990s couldn’t locate their own ass with a flashlight. We used to find patients roaming in the woods, chanting at Taco Bell, sleeping behind the churches. It was easy to wander out. Plus, here’s the interesting thing: Flaherty’s on a mental hold right now.”

“Right.” Ellie remembered Rogan mentioning that fact when he told her Flaherty’s history, but didn’t understand why Sullivan was bringing it up.

“Did you happen to check the dates of the hold?” Sullivan asked.

She looked to Rogan for guidance, but he shook his head.

“Joseph turned himself in—which he
never
does voluntarily, by the way—a little more than a week after Helen Brunswick was killed. You happen to remember when that anonymous letter to your DA was postmarked?”

She recited the date from memory.

“Yep. Joseph locked himself down the very next day. I may be a dumb old-timer from a Podunk town, but that’s what we hicks like to call one heck of a co-inky-dink.”

I
t was only eight o’clock in the morning, but Carrie’s mother answered the door neatly attired in a crisp white cotton shirt and slim black pants. Even the morning after Carrie’s father had died, Rosemary Blank had gone straight from the first opening of her eyes in bed to the shower into a clean set of clothes. As she liked to say: Lose an hour in the morning and you’ll hunt all day for it.

“You don’t knock on your own front door, Carrie.”

Carrie hadn’t lived here in years, but she still had her own key. Her mother led the way to the small table in the kitchen. A half piece of blackened wheat toast was still on a plate—part of the same set of dishes Carrie had eaten from as a child. Next to her mother’s coffee mug was an open library book, jacket side up. The spine read:
The Opposite of Spoiled
. Her mother was always reading something.

“I was starting to wonder if everyone in Utica would see my daughter before I did.” She retrieved another mug from the cabinet next to the refrigerator, filled it with coffee, and handed it to Carrie. “Mrs. Lemon told me she saw you in the McDonald’s drive-through yesterday. I told her that wasn’t possible. My daughter would never poison her body that way.”

“Never!” Carrie said, sharing her mother’s knowing smile as they both took seats at the kitchen table. “I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier. We’ve been working nonstop. So much has happened.”

“I saw on the news that he was released. Clearly, Linda Moreland hired the right lawyer for the job.”

Carrie had prepared herself for all the other reactions another parent might have given. Disappointment that Carrie had helped release a man from prison without clear proof of his innocence. Embarrassment at her association with a notorious and despised criminal. Fear of public reprisals.

But Carrie’s mother was proud of her.

“Why do you look so sad?” she asked. “You were hoping I might have some other reaction, so you can tell your friends how hard your mother is always pushing you?”

Clearly she had caught her mother in a playful mood. “No, it’s nothing. Or everything. I don’t know. I saw Tim yesterday. He was talking about Melanie. How she should have been the one to go away for school. Maybe she would have been able to cut it, even with TJ.”

“Not that again. If that was anyone’s fault, it was mine. You were trying to take care of me after Daddy died. Do you know how painful it was for me—after everything—to be the one who kept you from your full potential?”

She should have known that her mother was the wrong person to talk to about this. Carrie felt the tears starting again but pushed her emotions back. She had to get it together. “Sorry, Mom. It’s just been a rough couple of days. This case brought up a lot of old memories.”

“You’ll be fine. You always are.”

Carrie had been so afraid to tell her mother she had taken the job. Now she didn’t know how to tell her she had quit.

“There’s something I never told you, Mom.”

“Oh, I’m shocked. I thought daughters told their mothers
everything
.” The smile again.

“I saw you arguing with her. With Donna, that day she came to the house. I was upstairs. You thought I didn’t hear over my music, but I was watching.”

“Why didn’t you come down?”

She stared into her mug. “I was scared. I’d never seen you so angry. And she sounded so—desperate. I thought if I came down, things would really explode. I planned to go to her later. I wanted to see her, and I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“If you think that’s any surprise to me, you’re wrong. Of course I knew you’d want to see her. That’s why your father and I prohibited it. You always had a soft spot for that girl. You would have forgiven her anything.”

“But that’s what I’m telling you, Mom. I know you saw me as the victim, but I was the one who insisted she take that money. I didn’t understand that she needed to be
ready
to stop using. She wasn’t, and I pushed that money on her. I made things worse, don’t you understand? When you guys shut her out, I felt like it was my fault. I wanted to see her—not to forgive her, but to apologize.”

Her mother was shaking her head.

“I never got a chance to say goodbye.” Carrie remembered the police report filed by Donna’s mother after she went missing. “Why didn’t you ever tell the police about that day?”

“I never needed to. We were only using the threat of pressing charges to keep her away from you.”

“I don’t mean the money, Mom. Donna told Marcia she was coming to our house the last time she saw her. According to the police report, you told the police she was never here.”

“Because she wasn’t. Not that day, at least. You were young. You’re misremembering the timing.”

Carrie was quite certain her memory was right. The day after the incident at the house, Carrie was tied up with a morning debate-team practice, followed by a full shift at the movie theater. But on Sunday, she’d gone to Donna’s house. Marcia said Donna hadn’t been home all weekend and she was beginning to worry. Carrie specifically remembered being grateful that she had a mother who would “begin to worry” five minutes after her curfew, not two days later.

Carrie thought about trying to explain the timing to her mother, but took another sip of coffee instead. She didn’t have the energy to argue. And it didn’t even make a difference anymore. Anthony Amaro was out, and no one seemed interested in finding out who should be in prison, if not Amaro. All Linda Moreland cared about was money, and bringing down the police, and freeing more clients, and she had used Carrie as a pawn in a chess game Carrie barely understood.

This time, she couldn’t hold back the tears. She hadn’t felt failure like this since she had to pack up her dorm room in Ithaca. “I screwed up, Mom. It was too big. Too much. I didn’t stop and think.”

“About what?”

“The job. Linda Moreland. Anthony Amaro. I quit last night, Mom. I wanted to believe I got that job because I was so special, but she was using me. She wanted to hold me out there for all the world to see:
Look, even the victims’ families believe he’s innocent
. But I don’t, or at least I’m not convinced. And Donna’s killer, whoever he is? He’s still out there. I’m going back to the city tomorrow to beg my way back into Russ Waterston.”

Somehow her mother managed to piece together a meaningful thought buried in the words that were spilling out. “You won’t have to beg for anything, Carrie. You are the smartest, kindest, most talented person I know. And you’re a good person. You always have been. Anyone would be lucky to have you. You will always land on your feet. Any setback only makes you stronger. Because that’s what your father and I wanted for you.”

Carrie could feel her breath becoming more even. Her mother’s hushing sounds, the feeling of her warm hands soothing her back, made her feel like a child again.

“Do you understand now about the police report?”

Carrie looked up at her mother’s face.

“When they asked if she’d been here, she’d only been gone a few days. Donna was always coming and going. And then, later, once they found her—what difference would it have made? Donna hurt you enough when she was alive. You didn’t need to be dragged into her death. This is exactly what I was trying to save you from. Don’t you see?”

T
he conference room on the second floor of the Utica PD headquarters was surprisingly modern. Ellie, Rogan, and Sullivan sat elbow-to-elbow in front of a webcam. Behind them, an Oneida County ADA named Mike Siebecker was pacing. On the large screen on the opposite wall was an image of Max, appearing via video conference.

The detectives had dominated the conversation for the last forty-five minutes, detailing all available evidence involving all of the murders. Now it was time for the lawyers to talk through the legal issues.

Siebecker took the lead. “If you look only at our Utica victims, we basically have nothing except the cellmate saying Amaro quasi-confessed, which isn’t probable cause on its own. The only way to get to PC is to pull in evidence involving the city victim, Deborah Garner, where we’ve got the single-witness identification and the confession. It’s dicey, but if you add that evidence to Harris’s statement, I think I could get a judge here to sign an arrest warrant.”

“That was our thinking,” Max said. “At least we’d know Amaro was behind bars while we continued to investigate.”

“But here’s the problem,” Siebecker added. “The affirmative evidence against Amaro is already thin, and then you’ve got to take into account what I’ll call the
negative
evidence—the evidence that points to an alternative suspect.”

“The unidentified DNA on Donna Blank,” Max said.

“I have some thoughts on that,” Ellie said, raising a hand. “In talking to people who knew the victims, there’s reason to believe that Donna Blank didn’t fit the profile. She worked at strip clubs. Took tips. Probably crossed the line into tricking in the bathrooms and the parking lot, but she wasn’t a hard-core working girl like the other victims.”

Sullivan made a coughing sound on the other side of Rogan. At least he removed his plastic chew-stick from his mouth before speaking. “I think turning tricks in parking lots makes someone a working girl.”

“But she was at the fringe of that world.” Ellie considered throwing in the fact that Mona had told Sullivan herself that Donna didn’t fit the profile of the other victims, but she had promised Mona to leave her out of this. Instead, she said, “I would’ve thought you’d be in a position to know this personally. Donna’s mother told us she saw her daughter get in your car.” She couldn’t see Rogan’s face, but on the screen, she saw Max looking at her as if she had burped at the head table of the State Dining Room.

Sullivan’s fingertips pressed against the table. His voice sounded strained. “I don’t know why you would say that in the tone you just used, Detective, but Donna Blank’s sister happens to be one of my son’s closest and oldest friends. As a favor to the family, I reached out to Donna to encourage her to seek help for her drug problem, but I assure you, that’s the extent of my contact with her.”

Siebecker made a time-out sign with his hands. “It’s not entirely about the unidentified DNA. We also have the anonymous letter claiming that whoever killed the Utica victims murdered Brunswick. Normally, courts don’t give credence to anonymous tips, but whoever wrote that letter knew that Helen Brunswick’s limbs had been broken—information that hadn’t been released to the public. Not to mention Brunswick’s connection to the mental-health system here treating some extremely dangerous people at the same time those women were killed. Anthony Amaro has no known connection to that world, but we have one individual—Joseph Flaherty—who obviously had a negative experience with Dr. Brunswick, and who just happened to have turned himself in for civil commitment shortly after her murder.”

“We don’t have anything close to probable cause on Joseph,” Ellie said.

“Agreed,” Siebecker said. “But that’s not my point.
Any
evidence against a person who is
not
Anthony Amaro is essentially a
subtraction
from the quantum of evidence we have to get us to probable cause. So, as for positive evidence against Amaro, we barely have probable cause, and then we add the negative evidence, and, alas, I don’t think we’re there.”

Ellie looked to Max, hoping he’d find a way out of this mathematical analogy. But instead, she heard, “I have to say, I concur.”

Rogan looked exhausted again. “Enough with the positive and the negative evidence talk. I may not know Oneida County, but if it’s like any other place in this country, there’s some judge you can call to sign what needs to be signed. It’s about getting our hands on this guy again.”

“The problem with that,” Max said, “is: What happens when you get him? You might find evidence on him. Or he might confess. And we’ll lose all of it if we don’t actually have the probable cause. I hate it that this guy’s on the streets as much as anyone, but we’ve got to do this right. Shoddy police work is what put us here in the first place.”