Angel's Tip by Alafair Burke Read Free Book Online Page B

for her on this one. He had been a detective in NYPD’s homicide squad for a little more than eight years. That was a little more than eight years longer than Ellie. With some amount of guilt, she gratefully accepted.
     
    HER CALLS TOOK less than three minutes. CSU would be ready for an initial briefing from the crime scene in an hour. The ME needed two.
    Rogan was still on the phone. He had his head down, eyes closed—right hand on the handset, the other massaging his left temple. It was as if he were picturing himself outside this room, away from NewYork City, standing on a front porch with two parents in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Ellie could almost imagine Rogan looking Mr. and Mrs. Hart in the eye and breaking the news: Your daughter was supposed to take a cab back to the hotel, but she never arrived.
    The image gave her an idea. She opened Internet Explorer on her computer, Googled the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, and dialed the telephone number listed on the commission’s Web site.
    For decades, drivers of New York City’s taxis had maintained their trip sheets by hand, using pen and paper to log the location and amount of each fare. Trying to track down a cab driver on the basis of paper trip sheets was like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack of thirteen thousand yellow cabs.
    The tide in the sea of paper had shifted just last year, however, when the city’s new high-tech requirements for all medallioned cars had gone into effect. Although a few drivers remained at war with the commission over the expensive technology, a critical mass of taxis was now equipped with computers that not only accepted credit card payments but also used GPS technology to automate the ancient trip sheet practices. Obtaining a list of the cabdrivers within a one-block radius of Pulse around the time of last call would have once been impossible; now it was just a matter of a few keystrokes on a computer.
    Ten minutes later, they had finished their calls. Rogan had learned that Chelsea’s parents would be coming to New York City on the next available flight. Ellie had faxed a photograph of Chelsea Hart to be circulated among cabdrivers who’d picked up early-morning fares in the Meatpacking District. And the lives of Paul and Miriam Hart were forever changed.

CHAPTER 8
    THE PROCESSING of the East River Park crime scene was in full swing. NYPD vans lined the park, backing up traffic on the FDR in both directions as drivers slowed to rubberneck. Yellow police tape, fortified by rows of uniform officers, closed the park from Sixth Street down to Cherry.
    They badged an officer standing guard north of the tennis courts, ducked beneath the yellow tape, and made their way to the construction site. Ellie had never been here in full daylight. Torn up and cluttered with piles of dislodged dirt, backhoes, and other heavy equipment she couldn’t name, this area of the park would have been almost as desolate as it had been during her early-morning runs, were it not for the chaos of the ongoing police investigation.
    Four officers were working the scene inside the fence. Rogan headed directly for a tall female officer with long red hair pulled into a braid that ran down her back. She was crouched in a squat, using tweezers to place something in a ziplock baggie.
    “Is that Florkoski?”
    The woman sealed the evidence collection bag and eased herselfback to standing. She had a broad face that broke into a friendly smile at the sight of Rogan.
    “Hey there, Double J. Good to see you.” She snapped a latex glove off of her right hand and extended it for a shake, first to Rogan and then to Ellie. “Mariah Florkoski.”
    “Ellie Hatcher,” Ellie said, returning both the smile and the handshake.
    “New partner,” Rogan said.
    “Oh, sure.” Florkoski nodded. “I recognize the name.”
    Ellie had no doubt that the recognition was due to her one and only previous homicide case two months earlier, when she had been