Ellie Hatcher Collection by Alafair Burke

Author:Alafair Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

PART III / No Surprises

CHAPTER 22

“I TOLD YOU. Detective McIlroy would check out stacks of cold cases at a time. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, and you can stand here all morning while I pull files, and none of that’s going to change.”

Ellie looked at her watch. She didn’t have all day. She had a precinct to go to. But her first stop on Wednesday morning had been to the Central Records Division at One Police Plaza.

She had come in the hope that it would be easy to identify which cases Flann McIlroy had been reviewing along with Robbie Harrington’s. The task was anything but. Flann had a penchant for checking out old files and looking for patterns. It had been his imaginative theories—connecting seemingly unrelated cases—that had earned him both praise and ridicule from his peers in the department, along with the nickname McIlMulder.

“He had all of these cases checked out at the same time as the Roberta Harrington file?”

She had asked the clerk to pull up any case files McIlroy had checked out in the three months preceding his phone call to Bill Harrington. The resulting printout was pages long.

“Like I said, he didn’t have all of these at the same time. He had up to fifteen cases checked out at a time. And, as far as I can tell, in that three-month window, he pulled a total of a hundred and seven.”

Once again, Ellie scanned the list of files. Once again, total disbelief.

“That’s actually a little light,” the woman remarked. “I used to joke he had a ten-file-a-week habit.”

Ellie had already asked the clerk to pull a random sample of the different files, and, on a brief skim, she had been unable to figure out which cases had been linked in McIlroy’s mind to Robbie Harrington’s murder, and which had been of interest for any number of other, unknowable reasons.

“You want me to pull some more reports or not?”

Ellie looked at the two-foot-high stack the clerk already needed to reshelve because of her morning research project.

“Don’t feel bad. God knows McIlroy never did.”

It wasn’t that Ellie didn’t want the woman to work. She just didn’t want the work to be futile.

One hundred and seven files? Ellie had only known Flann for a week before his death. During that time, she’d become a staunch supporter, but now she was beginning to wonder if he really had been certifiably insane. Even when she narrowed the list to female victims under thirty-five years old, seventy cases were left taunting her.

“What day did Flann return the Harrington file to CRD?”

The clerk entered a few keystrokes on her computer and recited a date about nine months after Flann had reached out to Robbie’s father. He had let the theory grind around in his brain for nine months after that phone call, until he’d apparently given it up. She wondered what more she could possibly add.

“Can you figure out which of these other cases he turned in on the same day?” Ellie asked.

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