Angel's Tip Read Free Page A

girl was dead, and the sound’s only effect had been to draw the attention of three passing joggers to her corpse.
    It would take Ellie’s partner at least twenty minutes to reach the scene from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. For now, she had to make sure his trip would not be wasted.
    The uniform officer riding in the passenger seat exited the sector car first. He looked like a lot of new cops. Fit. Baby-faced. Enthusiastic. Short haired. Maybe in a different decade, he would have enlisted in the army. These days, he probably had a mother who stopped him. Now he was law enforcement.
    He directed a flashlight at the dead girl. Ellie could tell from his reaction that this was his first body.
    “Oh, Jesus.” He reached for his stomach on reflex.
    “All upchuckers, over there.” Ellie directed the officer’s attention to Jess, who, as instructed, was standing well east of the crime scene, looking out at the river, taking deep breaths. “Detective Hatcher, Manhattan South homicide. I need your radio.”
    Ellie had wrapped up one week in the homicide bureau, and so far all she’d done was help her new partner tie together loose ends on his old cases and play support for other teams while she supposedly “learned the ropes.” Now she’d practically stumbled over this poor girl’s body inside the Manhattan South borough. She was the first cop on the scene, and she was a homicide detective. If she couldn’t weasel her way onto this case, she didn’t deserve her new assignment.
    The uniform looked at her, blinking rapidly. First a disfigured body, now a sweaty woman in a Pretenders T-shirt and sweatpants, demanding his radio.
    “But—”
    The young officer’s partner found the words he’d apparently been searching for once she’d stepped from the driver’s side of the car. “I’ll confirm it,” she said, reaching for the Vertex radio microphone clipped to the shoulder of her navy blue uniform. “And no one’s taking our radios. Sorry, ma’am.”
    Ellie nodded. The woman was a good cop. Depending on what precincts she’d been working, this could easily be her first body as well, but she was cool. Cooler than her partner. Just a quick glance at the body, then a more careful monitoring of everyone at the scene. Three runners, pacing. The sweaty woman who wanted their radio. The tall guy, looking out of place by the water.
    “Make sure that guy’s not going anywhere,” she said to her partner. She was definitely good. Of the people at the scene, Jess was the one who should have registered on a cop’s radar. And asking herpartner to keep Jess company gave the obviously nervous young cop some distance from the body.
    “You’re right,” Ellie said, holding up her palms. “Call it in. But tell them homicide’s already here. Shield 27990. Hatcher. They’ll have me down as Elsa.”
    She listened as the officer radioed in the essentials. They were at East River Park, south of Houston, north of the tennis courts. They had a 10–29–1.
    It was standard 10 code. A 10–29–1: 29 for a past crime, 1 for a homicide. Across the country, 10-codes were dying out in favor of so-called plain language. The Department of Homeland Security had gone so far as to force the NYPD to train its officers in the kind of plain English that was supposed to assist interagency communications in an emergency. Instead, the entire notion of an eight-hour training session on plain talk became just another opportunity for the NYPD to mock the feds.
    “We still need EMTs,” the officer said. Paramedics would have been dispatched with the original 911 call, but these days ambulances were in higher demand and correspondingly slower to respond than law enforcement. The homicide call-out would now bring technicians from the crime scene unit and the medical examiner’s office. So much for solitude along the East River.
    Ellie motioned the woman to speed it along. The officer confirmed Ellie’s badge number and notified the dispatcher