All Day and a Night Read Online Free PDF

and you don’t take shit from anyone. Not even me.” This time, his smile came naturally. “So, yeah, you’re absolutely right: I picked you for a reason. You’re the kind of person I can trust to do the right thing. And so is Rogan.”
    “But, like you said, your decision was about me. How do I explain that to Rogan?”
    “You don’t. This isn’t about personalities. If Anthony Amaro is innocent, that means someone left a serial killer on the street. And Helen Brunswick might just be the tip of the iceberg. There could be more victims, and Amaro will have spent eighteen years in prison for no reason. This is the most important job I’ve ever been asked to do as a prosecutor. To do it with anyone other than the two of you? That would be showing you special treatment.”
    They heard a tap on the door. “Hey,” Rogan said. “Wasn’t sure I had the right room.”
    They both knew he was testing the waters. Ellie took one more look at Max. He wasn’t going to budge.
    “This is the place,” she said, taking a seat. “Max was about to fill us in on what’s in these here boxes.”
    T he six cardboard file boxes formed a line across the rectangular top of the mahogany-veneer table. At the head and foot of the table stood matching white boards on wheels, both covered in an array of neatly printed, multicolored ink.
    “Our team figured we’d leave our work to help get you started.”
    Rogan had already erased one of the boards by the time Max finished speaking.
    “Hey, I get it,” Max said. “I can leave if you want.”
    Rogan pulled the top from one of the boxes and handed it to Max. “No way those stupid color-coded bullet-points were your handiwork. Show us what you’ve got.”
    “Six boxes of files: one for each of Amaro’s victims. That one”—he pointed to the box in front of Rogan—“is our office’s entire file on the murder of Deborah Garner, including all police reports.” Ellie could see that the various Redwelds and manila files barely fit inside. “It’s also the most complete. Although the other five cases were all closed, Amaro was only charged with, and only pled guilty to, one crime: the murder of Deborah Garner.”
    “Why just her?” Ellie asked.
    “To start with, it was the strongest of the cases and the one that led to Amaro’s arrest. Garner was also the last of the six victims. Think about the timing. Eighteen years ago? What was happening with criminal law in New York?”
    Rogan made the connection faster than she did. “New York passed the death penalty,” he said.
    Max pointed at Rogan. “Exactly. Deborah Garner was murdered two weeks after the death penalty went into effect. Pataki campaigned on the issue, and signed the law that Mario Cuomo wouldn’t. The courts have put a hold on it since then, but at the time, the fact that New York State was going to start executing people was big news. Deborah Garner was the only victim killed after the law went into effect, meaning it was the only case that was death-eligible. The threat of lethal injection was enough to leverage a guilty plea from Anthony Amaro in exchange for a life sentence, no parole. She was also the only victim in our office’s jurisdiction. The others were all found in Amaro’s hometown of Utica.”
    “That’s up near Albany, right?” More than a decade after moving to New York from Wichita, Ellie was like most city residents and had only a vague sense of the state’s geography beyond the metropolitan area.
    “Closer to Syracuse, but yeah, up there. If I had to guess, there was no point in another county going after Amaro for additional convictions. He was already behind bars forever, and—”
    “And they were only prostitutes,” Ellie added. They all knew the reality. Last year, she’d worked a case with a Los Angeles homicide detective who told her that either everyone counted or no one did, but in her experience, some people seemed to count a lot more when it came to prioritizing the