All Day and a Night (31 page)

She could picture Carrie Blank submitting a message on the DA’s website. Placing a phone call to the switchboard, using the name Debi Landry. Slipping a photocopy of yellowed documents from Amaro’s file with Child Protective Services into the mail.

And those weren’t the only images Ellie was seeing. She pictured Anthony Amaro, stalking the streets of Utica, in search of women whose bodies he could use to fulfill decade-old fantasies planted by an abusive mother and foster mother. She pictured him driving to New York City to visit Debi Landry, perhaps his subconscious’s true object of desire, and then selecting Deborah Garner at a New Jersey rest stop to unleash his frustrations. She pictured an obsessive Joseph Flaherty, tracking down the therapist he blamed for his lifetime of insanity and shooting her in the chest.

She was finally seeing the truth that Carrie Blank had wanted them to see.

But the series of scenes dissolved when she got to the image of Joseph Flaherty, breaking Helen Brunswick’s bones. Mailing letters to Anthony Amaro and the district attorney so they would connect the psychotherapist’s murder to the old cases.

Why? Was he fascinated by Amaro’s crimes? Did he idolize him? Maybe once he was in custody he would tell them. Or maybe he would have reasons only his delusional mind could understand.

She looked at her watch. Going on two and a half hours since the warrant to pick up Flaherty had been signed.

As if the world was aligning with her thoughts, she felt a buzz at her waist. It was a text from Max.
UPD heading to Flaherty’s now
.

Just a little longer.

J
oseph Flaherty spread the newspaper articles around him on the bed.

He liked his bed. It was the same one he’d had since his mother took him to that parking lot off of Oriskany Boulevard, filled with furniture offered at what the signs promised were below-wholesale prices. Helium balloons floated over the entrance, cotton candy and snowcone machines drew customers to the rear. He was thirteen years old and his mother said it was time for him to have a grown-up bed. “Try as many of the mattresses as you need to,” she said. “Dr. Harper says it will help if you can get more sleep.”

Back then, they thought a change in the mattress might just fix him. Twenty-seven years later, the bed was still holding up fine. So was he, if people would only realize.

Joseph could barely remember a time in his life when he wasn’t trying to prove that everyone didn’t need to worry about him so much. He had seen pictures of himself with his mother and father and older brother when he was little. They all held him and smiled at him like they would at a normal baby, like they loved him. Even in grade school, when teachers and principals and other kids started to say he was “quiet,” or “different,” or “off,” they were all still together at home. He just didn’t like to be hugged or touched or looked at, that’s all. He didn’t see why that had to be such a problem.

It wasn’t until middle school that he went to the first doctor. Then Dad and David moved to California to start over, without him and Mom.

Joseph began to understand he was different, because everyone kept telling him that. But he never hurt anyone—not until a couple of months ago, at least. It seemed the more he tried to tell people that he was the good one—and that other people were the bad ones—the more he got into trouble. The longer he stayed at the hospital. The less he got to be home, in this room, on the comfortable bed he had chosen for himself the last time he could remember anyone else believing his troubles were about to be fixed.

That’s why it was so important to him at Cedar Ridge when he had decided to trust Dr. Brunswick with the information he had. The hero had given him some of the truth, but Joseph found out from the newspaper there was more to his story. It wasn’t just one. It was five. Going to Dr. Brunswick was Joseph’s single chance to show everyone that he was the hero, while the people who held themselves up as heroes were devils. He knew the truth, and had been handed an opportunity to prove his righteousness.

He tried to explain it all to Dr. Brunswick. He concentrated as hard as he could and tried to get the words out, in his own way. But Dr. Brunswick hadn’t believed him. Not only that, she called the police on him. And then he tried to tell people that the police were in on it, too. That they were covering up for the false hero. And that only got him in more trouble.

His whole life got so much worse because of Dr. Brunswick.

And then Joseph had seen the hero in a new light, fooling more people, and Joseph knew he had been given a second chance to tell the world what he knew.

He couldn’t just explain, not like he tried before. The pills had gotten better since then, and now he was better with his words. But he knew what the doctors had been writing about him all these years. He knew they’d never believe him. They were convinced he was delusional. Hallucinating. Crazy.

But how could someone delusional come up with such a brilliant plan? A new police investigation, with a new victim like the forgotten ones, would show the truth.

The only problem was picking the new victim. That was really the part that proved Joseph was a good person. He could have picked anyone. But justice meant that the sacrifice be paid by Dr. Brunswick. She was the one who didn’t listen when she had the chance. She had blood on her hands.

He was folding up the newspaper articles, one by one, when he thought he heard a knock—maybe even a voice—at the front door. If the sounds at the door were real, his mom would get it.

Many of the articles were worn from handling, nearly falling apart, but he’d been adding new ones since the local paper first reported that Anthony Amaro had asked a court to release him. Maybe one day soon he would be able to meet the man, and Amaro would shake Joseph’s hand and thank him for freeing him with the truth.

He had just finished tucking the final clipping into his shoebox, right beneath the gun, when he heard the thud. A shriek from his mom. “Police. Don’t move. We’re here for Joseph Flaherty.”

At last, they had come to him. Joseph was finally going to be able to show them. He had his box of articles all ready to go. He would choose his words carefully. He rose from the bed, prepared to explain it all.

His bedroom door opened. He recognized the detective. His being here was perfect. It was proof that even he understood the truth now. Everyone would know that Joseph was never the one they should have been worried about. He was never a threat.

The last word he heard was “GUN!” before he felt the impact of the first bullet.

E
llie checked the screen of her phone yet again. Nothing.

“You?” she asked Max, who was next to her on the sofa.

Max shook his head. Tonight’s itinerary had consisted of picking at Chinese leftovers while they checked their phones for incoming calls. It had been nearly two hours since Will Sullivan told Max he had a team outside Joseph Flaherty’s house, ready to take him into custody. She could’ve been up there if they were going to take this long.

The chirp of Max’s phone broke the silence. “Donovan.”

He blinked. Then winced. Then closed his eyes as he continued to listen. She could tell it wasn’t good news.

“Anyone else hurt?” he asked.

No, she thought. No, no, no, no, no. They should have waited. She and Rogan should have been there.

“Okay. We’ll need more information to close the Brunswick case. Rogan and Hatcher will come up in the morning.”

He was about to set his phone in a container of
mapo
tofu when she caught his hand. His eyes were somewhere else but found focus in her stare.

“That was Mike Siebecker from the DA’s office up there. Joseph pulled a gun when they entered the house. Sullivan fired. A clean shoot. No other injuries.”

“Fatal?”

“DOA.”

“What about Amaro? Did Joseph say anything about why he used Amaro’s MO? Why he wrote the letters tying Brunswick to the other cases?”

“It happened fast. We’ll find out more tomorrow.”

Ellie didn’t need to wait another day to know that their chances of learning the full story had probably died along with Joseph Flaherty.

T
hey found Will Sullivan on a walnut-stained swing on the front porch of a two-story bungalow. He had a price-club-sized bucket of red licorice next to him.

“Nice car,” he said, eyeing Rogan’s BMW.

“Nice house,” Rogan replied. He and Ellie leaned on the porch railing across from Sullivan’s swing.

“Heck of a lot better than where I called home until a couple of years ago. My son finally convinced me that I’d be okay borrowing some money for a nicer place while interest rates were low. Licorice?” He offered them the bucket, and they declined. “Straight sugar, but the doctor says anything’s better than cigarettes. Guess it’s an oral fixation.”

“One of your guys at the station told us we’d find you here,” Rogan said. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“Nope. Funny, I think this might be the first time since I bought the house that I’ve actually sat here on this swing with my newspaper, the way I pictured when I decided to take it. Seemed like a real dream, the proverbial picket fence. I can’t even describe the guilt I felt when I was loading up the U-Haul from my old place in Red View.”

Ellie recognized the name of the neighborhood from their conversation with Rosemary Blank.

“That’s where the Blank family lived?” she asked.

“Yep. Look it up in the census. One of the highest-poverty, highest-crime neighborhoods in the state of New York.”

“Not a typical choice for a cop.”

“I wasn’t always a cop. Had a minimum-wage security job at a discount clothing store, the kind with last year’s fashions, a layaway plan with worse terms than the neighborhood bookie, and cigarette butts on the dressing room floors. They called it full-time but always kept my hours under thirty so they didn’t have to pay benefits. My wife waitressed, and we somehow managed to scrape by, even after Bill came along. Then Maddie died. I don’t think Bill and I would’ve made it if I hadn’t gone on the job. The feds had promised to put a hundred thousand new officers on the street. Utica got enough money to hire three new cops, and I was one of them.”

“Best and worst decision of your life.” It was a favorite line among cops.

“It was probably three years into the job when I could have swung a move out of Red View. Steady salary. A modest down payment. But by then, the people there liked the idea of a neighborhood cop and his son. The older residents—the ones who were afraid to walk the streets because of the gangs and the guns and the drugs—they felt a little safer if they saw my lights on. Even the ones who were up to no good had to admit a kernel of respect for a cop who at least knew the lay of the land.”

Rogan and Ellie offered polite acknowledgments that they were listening. After Ellie had killed someone in the line of duty, Rogan had done the same thing for her, allowing her to go off on long tangents to avoid talking about the could-haves and should-haves that would inhabit her brain the minute she stopped talking.

“But now I’m older, getting close to retirement, and the sketchy types are getting younger and rougher. Figured I wouldn’t always have the power of the badge, so now I have this place and my porch. I realized after a year or so, I’d actually stopped locking the doors. But, man, I really felt like I was abandoning those people when I left. A few neighbors said goodbye, but I saw a lot of them close their blinds as I was packing up. I wonder how they feel about me shooting a mentally ill boy while his mother could hear from the next room.”

He stopped rocking on his swing. He was ready to talk about it.

“Joseph didn’t give you a choice,” Ellie said. “I’ve been in a similar situation. You can’t beat yourself up over it. He was the one who made the decision. He turned you into his own weapon.” The man she killed had held her lieutenant, and then her, at gunpoint. He announced his intention to kill her. If not for a lucky moment when she’d taken her chance, she knew for a certainty she’d be dead. From what ADA Siebecker had reported to Max, Joseph didn’t have a gun in his hands, not technically. He had been reaching for a gun inside a shoebox he was holding. As with any officer-involved shooting, Sullivan was suspended with pay until an official determination was made regarding justification, but Ellie had no doubt that Sullivan would be cleared. Career cop plus armed insane murderer was easy math.

“I wanted to question him,” Sullivan said. “I was so sure I had a chance at somehow connecting to him. Now we may never know what really happened.”

“Siebecker said they found a treasure trove of news articles about the entire case,” Rogan said. “The original murders, Helen Brunswick’s killing, Amaro’s release. I think that makes it pretty clear what happened.”

Ellie could see Sullivan’s gaze move to his lap. “Our current theory,” she said, “is that he became obsessed as a teenager with Amaro’s crimes. He decided to kill Helen Brunswick, whom he may have resented for first calling the police on him all those years ago. He replicated Amaro’s MO, giving him a basis to challenge his conviction. It would’ve been nice to have had confirmation—sorry, that’s not what I meant. Our ADA’s working on an arrest warrant for Amaro now. We’ll see whether a judge goes for it, but at this point we need a warrant in place to make sure Amaro doesn’t get too far.”

“Someone should be watching out for the cellmate,” Will said. “After what happened to Carrie—”

“Your department has a car in front of Harris’s house. He knows the stakes.”

“Any updates from the doctors?”

“Not yet, but they say there’s no reason to believe Carrie won’t regain full neurologic function. I met both her mother and your very impressive son at the hospital. You must be extremely proud.”

He smiled sadly. “Hard to feel proud of anything right now. We lost our shot at questioning Joseph. And I’ve got to wonder if Carrie would be okay if I had found Anthony Amaro by now.”