City of Lies

City of Lies Alafair Burke A fast-paced thriller from Alafair Burke, where no-one in Manhattan is safe. And no-one is innocent.In New York City nights are dangerous. Days are numbered.When New York University student Megan Gunther is brutally murdered, NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher and partner J.J. Rogan discover that Megan has been on the receiving end of some sinister online threats.Is her death the result of a campus feud that got out of hand or could there be a twisted cyber fanatic at work?And when a link is revealed between Megan and a murdered real-estate agent, Ellie comes to wonder if there was something else behind the student’s death.Ellie learns that the dead woman shared a secret connection to a celebrity mogul whose bodyguard was mysteriously killed a few months earlier.When Megan's roommate disappears, the hunt for the killer is really on…With fans including everyone from Michael Connelly, Harlan Coben, and Lee Child to Tess Gerritsen, Lisa Gardner and Kathy Reichs, Alafair Burke gives us another nail-biting thriller to keep us on the edge of our seats. City of Lies Alafair Burke Copyright (#ulink_b639e1a8-220b-5662-8299-fdfe98dae8ed) This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. AVON A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/) First published in the U.S.A as 212 by HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, NY, 2010 Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 Copyright © Alafair Burke 2010 Alafair Burke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9781847561107 Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007363025 Version: 2016-10-04 For Philip, Mary, and Anne-Lise Spitzer Table of Contents Cover Page (#uf73cc827-4cf5-5b92-9150-10a108216fe6) Title Page (#u216b6ed9-8ba8-534d-867d-283e8832e4c8) Copyright (#u3980cae2-aebe-5c51-b446-777636a49bd1) Dedication (#u1093b1fe-cec1-5f41-ba92-79231b65c74d) Chapter One (#u8ed60536-8526-58bb-a362-62c37bcbf68d) Chapter Two (#ufb526e63-fb83-5aba-83ee-3a7088273958) Part I You Can’t Let This Get to You. (#u5bf92fad-16c0-5c53-9023-408f4baffec7) Chapter Three (#u9dedd07a-aa6c-5683-bf83-457c1b75efce) Chapter Four (#ud6a83754-0191-5b5b-8946-a8157065f391) Chapter Five (#u4c7adecb-8950-5c67-9612-873b9f2018ba) Chapter Six (#uee205580-da09-558c-81fb-085f32a9a792) Chapter Seven (#u98006e72-fec6-5345-aca7-667489030881) Chapter Eight (#ub098e95b-b09c-56d3-a02b-719cd01941bf) Chapter Nine (#u639d59b9-92d2-5695-8609-0f38d961a530) Chapter Ten (#u981686ea-2cbb-5f88-9e90-37b7fcea1a48) Chapter Eleven (#uaa2332bf-e483-5edb-861e-33c35bf40b4c) Chapter Twelve (#u0f9bac3d-bd52-5106-9006-37023cd94c76) Chapter Thirteen (#uc50fa169-e27d-57f8-b608-d4daaed28bd6) Chapter Fourteen (#u5f142745-97a1-5edb-b2d3-72fa7f6acb92) Chapter Fifteen (#u3eea7e0b-e39f-52ac-9ad9-1a0c73b34649) Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Part II ‘Go Ahead. Lie to Me.’ (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Part III It Was All About May 27. (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Part IV Easy Money (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Part V Secrets (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Other books by (#litres_trial_promo) Guide To New York (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter One (#ulink_33369b26-6816-5386-919e-bb53f2138da5) May 27 Tanya Abbott noticed the quiver in her index finger as it pressed the three silver buttons in the rain – 9…1…1. Listening to the ring, she found herself mentally calculating the number of days that had passed since she had first arrived in New York City. Tanya had put the number at twenty-six by the time the dispatcher answered the call. It had been three full weeks and another five days. ‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’ She’d taken the Amtrak to Penn Station three Thursdays ago, and now it was Tuesday night. Twenty-six days in New York. Twenty-six days since she had started over again. Twenty-six days, and already she was calling 911. ‘Hello? Is anyone there? What is your emergency?’ Tanya cleared her throat. ‘The penthouse apartment at Lafayette and Kenmare.’ ‘That’s your location, ma’am? Tell me what’s going on there.’ The corner of Lafayette and Kenmare was no longer Tanya’s location, but twenty minutes earlier, she had been inside the luxury penthouse perched on top of the white brick building on the corner. She’d sipped Veuve Clicquot from a crystal flute while leaning against the black granite bar. She had lounged on the low white-leather sectional sofa with her legs crossed modestly as her host pointed out the panoramic SoHo views of the Hudson River, temporarily obscured by cascading sheets of rain. She had followed him into the master suite. She had cleaned herself up with a washcloth in the gleaming marble bathroom when it was all over. ‘A shooting. There’s been a shooting.’ Tanya used her palm to wipe away the drops of water from her eyes, tears mixed with rain. Her attempts were futile, serving only to smear mascara across her clammy cheeks. ‘You heard gunshots?’ ‘Inside the apartment.’ ‘Ma’am. I need you to use your words. You heard gunshots from inside the apartment? Could you tell what direction they were coming from?’ ‘There was a shooting. Inside the apartment at Lafayette and Kenmare.’ ‘I’ve got your location as Lafayette and Bond, ma’am. Did you mean to say Lafayette and Bond?…I need you to speak to me, ma’am. Can you tell me if you’re okay? Are you hurt?’ Tanya hadn’t realized that she had run five full blocks before finding a pay phone. She couldn’t even remember crossing Houston. Maybe her heart was pounding because of the running. She found comfort in the thought of some distance between her and the apartment. ‘Lafayette and Kenmare. The penthouse.’ ‘Can you tell me your name, ma’am? I’ve got an ambulance on the way. Just keep talking to me. My name’s Tina Brooks. Can you tell me your name?’ Tanya returned the handset to its cradle and sprinted south on Lafayette toward the subway station at Bleecker. She hadn’t given her name to the dispatcher, and she hadn’t used her cell phone. She could move swiftly without prompting attention from the other pedestrians who were also rushing for shelter. At the same moment Tina Brooks had dispatched an ambulance to the penthouse, she had no doubt sent a police car to the pay phone on the corner of Lafayette and Bond to search for the anonymous caller who had dialed 911. But before either vehicle reached its intended destination, Tanya Abbott would be long gone, drying her face against her damp sleeve and catching her breath on the 6 train. Chapter Two (#ulink_e58ef597-56a8-5c43-8411-54702845a34f) Detective Ellie Hatcher and her partner, J. J. Rogan, were soaked. Not damp. Not soggy. Soaked. The rainfall that poured onto Manhattan’s streets that night felt like the kind that meteorologists might measure in buckets per second. Ellie should have been grateful for the storm. It was the first break in a week-long, record-setting late-May heat wave. For seven consecutive days, the mercury had approached triple digits. Those kinds of oppressive temperatures were never cause to celebrate, but in New York City, atmospheric heat led to an altogether different kind of swelter. Thanks to the combination of heat-retaining concrete and still, breezeless air, the entire city reeked of a unique potpourri of body odor, garbage, and urine. The streets and subways were crowded. People were sticky. People were cranky. People drank more. They stayed out later. And people got dangerous. In New York City, heat begets violence. Ellie and Rogan had hoped that the rainfall might wash in their first quiet night of what had been a hectic week. They should have known better. Their first callout was to the scene of a reported homicide in SoHo. A couple huddled beneath a restaurant awning had made out the image of a man’s prone body in the backseat of a BMW 325 parked on Grand. By the time EMTs found the track marks and Ellie pulled the eighteen inches of rubber tubing from the back passenger footwell, Ellie and her partner were soaked. They had just reported clear and were looking forward to drying out back in the squad room when the second call came in, this time to a penthouse apartment at Lafayette and Kenmare. As they drove up Crosby, Ellie noticed a small pile of flowers propped up against a stoop at the corner of Broome, a rain-battered memorial to the late Heath Ledger. It had been more than four months since the actor’s accidental overdose; today, the media had announced the death of Sydney Pollack from stomach cancer. When celebrities died, everyone cared, even though the public knew those stars no better than whatever sad sack Ellie and Rogan were about to open a new case file for. The address at the condo turned out to be 212 Lafayette, but the blue glass sign on the bright white exterior marked the building merely as 212. Whereas builders had co-opted the American West a century ago with names like the Dakota, the Wyoming, and the Oregon, the latest flavor was minimalist titles that managed to evoke images of urban perfection with one discreet word: Cielo, Onyx, Azure. And what could be more quintessentially New York than Manhattan’s famous area code – 212? Dishwater gray puddles had pooled at their feet by the time the elevator reached the seventh floor. The doors parted to reveal a narrow hallway occupied by a uniform officer standing between two slate-colored doors. The officer nodded in the direction of the open one. ‘Not technically a penthouse,’ Rogan observed as the elevator doors whispered shut behind them. ‘In a real penthouse, you walk directly from the elevator and into the apartment.’ The foyer alone was twice the size of Ellie’s entire apartment.‘I don’t care if a realtor would call it a shanty,’ she said. ‘I’d take it.’ Rogan unbuttoned his trench coat and let it fall to the foyer floor. Ellie did the same with her black slicker. The last thing they needed was a waterlogged crime scene. As they made their way to the sounds of voices beyond the living room, Ellie took in the apartment’s condition. Beneath a single built-in shelf, books were scattered haphazardly across the floor. The empty drawers of a credenza in the dining room were flung open. Kitchen cabinets, also open. A pyramid of unlit logs rested picturesquely beneath a mantel sporting a single crystal-framed photograph: a handsome middle-aged man shaking hands with the former president. The man looked familiar. The person in the picture was not, however, the man they found splayed naked on the white sheets of a king-size bed in the master suite, a used condom knotted neatly on top of the nightstand beside him. Bullet holes riddled the corpse, the bed beneath the corpse, and the wall behind the bed. The nightstand and dresser drawers were open, as were the doors to two double closets. All empty. By comparison, the adjoining bathroom looked relatively peaceful, with only a stack of towels toppled onto the floor. A voice from the living room interrupted their inspection of the disarray. ‘Robo? Robo! Where the hell is he?’ ‘Detectives. I think the apartment owner’s here.’ A uniform officer stood nervously in the doorway of the master bedroom. ‘Who called him?’ Rogan asked. The officer shrugged. ‘We called the super. The super must’ve called the owner.’ ‘Did someone ask you to call the super, Officer?’ Above Rogan’s clenched jaw, a vein pulsed at his temple. ‘Did we ask you to do that?’ ‘I’ll deal with it,’ Ellie said, brushing past the uniform as he muttered a halfhearted apology. She turned in the living room to face a trim, middle-aged man in a black tuxedo and white bow tie. He had closely clipped silver hair and intense green eyes. She recognized him as the man from the photograph on the mantel. He eyed her up and down, clearly trying to determine how a barefoot woman in a turquoise linen shirt and black pencil-legged pants fit in among an apartment full of uniformed police officers. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Detective Ellie Hatcher. NYPD.’ She flipped open the badge holder that was clipped to her waistband. ‘I take it from your bare feet that two of these many shoes on my Ryan McGinness belong to you.’ ‘You mean on your rug?’ Ellie looked at the patterned area rug separating her from the man in the tuxedo. ‘It’s art,’ the man said, ‘but you apparently don’t recognize that. Robo, get this cleaned up. Robo – I called him forty-five minutes ago to deal with this shit. Robo –’ He headed toward the bedroom, but Ellie held her hand up. ‘I answered your question, sir. Now it’s my turn. Who are you?’ She still could not put her finger on where she’d seen him before. ‘I’m the man who owns the apartment you all have apparently commandeered. Robo –’ ‘Is Robo a well-built guy? Brown hair? Sleeve tattoo wrapped up his right arm, leprechaun tat on his left hip?’ He blinked at her. ‘I don’t even want to process what you’re insinuating.’ ‘I wasn’t insinuating anything. Assuming you have never seen the tattoo on the man’s hip, the rest of the description fits?’ The man nodded. ‘Where is he? I don’t appreciate getting called away from an important event by some building superintendent.’ ‘Unfortunately, sir, the man you’re calling Robo is dead. He was shot in what is apparently your bed. And he was naked in your bed, in case you were wondering.’ The man stared at her for three full beats before the corner of his mouth crept upward. ‘You’re going to regret this conversation, Miss Hatcher. I won’t ask you to clean up the mess you’ve made lest you accuse me of sexism, but please have one of these lackeys standing guard on taxpayer dollars remove your soggy shoes from what you so eloquently called my rug. It’s worth more than you make in a year.’ ‘First I need a name and some identification, sir.’ ‘Samuel Sparks.’ He didn’t even feign a reach for his wallet. ‘And who’s Robo?’ ‘His name is Robert Mancini. He’s one of my protection specialists. I’ve been calling him ever since I was beckoned down here about some kind of police emergency.’ ‘A protection specialist. You mean a bodyguard?’ The man nodded, and Ellie suddenly matched the name to the face: Samuel Sparks was Sam Sparks. That Sam Sparks. Before she scored a rent-stabilized sublet of questionable legality, she had perused countless real estate listings for units in Sparks’s buildings that she could not afford. This was the man who had been rumored to be purchasing the 110-building Stuyvesant Town to convert into condos before a rival tycoon outbid him. He was the mogul who had been photographed with so many A-list women that he himself had become fodder for the tabloids and paparazzi, including some who speculated about the sexuality of the self-declared ‘permanent bachelor’. Ellie assumed those rumors might explain Sparks’s response to her mention of the victim’s exposed hip. Sparks’s smirk widened into a full-blown smile. ‘You can apologize after these shoes have been picked up.’ Needless to say, Ellie did not apologize. ‘Mr. Sparks, your apartment is now officially a crime scene. I need you to leave.’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Did you hear my request, sir?’ ‘Of course I heard you, but –’ ‘Then I’m ordering you, for the second time now, to leave the premises.’ Ellie intentionally used the kind of I-get-high-on-my-authority tone that made a person want to disobey. ‘I am not leaving my own –’ ‘Sam Sparks, you’re under arrest for disobeying the lawful order of a police officer.’ Ellie used her index finger to signal to a uniform officer who’d been observing cautiously from the front doorway. The officer removed his handcuffs from his duty belt. ‘You want to do the honors, or should I?’ the officer asked. Sparks sucked his teeth and squinted at the officer’s nameplate. ‘Officer T. S. Amos. I’d warn against taking another step in my direction unless you plan to spend the rest of your NYPD career on parking patrol.’ Ellie snatched the handcuffs from the uniform’s grasp. ‘Not to worry, Amos. This one’s all me.’ Part I (#ulink_068209e5-2045-537d-981e-60e6b2510d1c)You Can’t Let This Get to You. Chapter Three (#ulink_d3b48148-fc98-5c80-ac54-3f8696802285) Four months later…Wednesday, September 24 11: 00 a.m. Ellie Hatcher raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But the testimony she gave before Judge Paul Bandon was not really the whole truth. It was a dry, concise recitation of the basic facts – and only the facts – of a callout 120 days earlier. Time: 11:30 p.m. Location: a penthouse apartment at a building called 212 at the corner of Lafayette and Kenmare. Nature of the callout: a report of shots fired, followed by the subsequent discovery of a bullet-ridden body in the bedroom. The dead man: Robert ‘Robo’ Mancini, bodyguard to Manhattan real estate mogul Sam Sparks. Ellie allowed herself a glance at Sparks, who sat at counsel table with a blank-faced stare next to his lawyer, Ramon Guerrero. According to her police report, Sparks was fifty-five years old, but looking at him this morning, she could understand why he enjoyed the serial companionship of the various models and aspiring starlets who graced his side on the society pages. It wasn’t just the money. With his square jaw, bright green eyes, and a permanent Clint Eastwood squint, Sparks exuded the kind of chiseled intensity that was catnip to a certain kind of woman. Ellie was surprised that he had bothered to make a personal appearance. It was probably the man’s way of signaling to Judge Bandon that this hearing was just as important to him as it was to the police. The only spectator on the government’s side of the courtroom, in the back bench by the entrance, was Genna Walsh, the victim’s sister. Ellie had told her there was no point coming into the city for the hearing, but she could not be dissuaded. Perhaps Sparks was not the only one trying to send a message. Assistant District Attorney Max Donovan continued to feed Ellie the straightforward questions that would lay the groundwork for today’s motion. ‘Did the decedent reside at the apartment in which his body was found – the penthouse in the 212 Building at 212 Lafayette?’ ‘No, he did not. Mr. Mancini’s personal residence was in Hoboken, New Jersey.’ ‘Did he own the apartment where his body was found?’ Donovan asked. ‘No.’ ‘Who does own the apartment?’ ‘Mancini’s employer, Sam Sparks.’ ‘In your thorough search of the crime scene, did you find any evidence to suggest that the decedent was staying long-term at the 212?’ ‘No, we did not.’ ‘No suitcase, no toothbrush or shaving kit, nothing along those lines?’ ‘No.’ Ellie hated the formal back-and-forth that was inherent in testifying. She’d prefer to sit across a desk from Judge Bandon and lay it all out for him. ‘In fact, Mr. Sparks himself told us that very night that the decedent was only using the apartment for the evening.’ Again, Ellie reported just the facts. According to Sparks, he had completed the development at 212 six months earlier and kept the penthouse for himself as an investment and as a place to host the European investors who increasingly preferred downtown’s modern lofts to the more conventional temporary housing stock in midtown. To further justify the space as a corporate deduction, he allowed his personal assistant and security officers to make use of the apartment when the calendar permitted. Max Donovan had pinned photographs from the crime scene on a bulletin board next to the witness stand. Moving through the sequence of photos, Ellie described the disorder in the apartment – the open cabinets and drawers, the relatively few possessions in the apartment tossed to the floor like confetti. ‘From the looks of it,’ Max said, ‘only the bathroom was spared?’ In the final picture on the board, a single cabinet door in the otherwise tidy master bathroom was flung open, a pile of towels splayed on the tile floor beneath the sink. ‘That’s about right,’ Ellie responded. ‘I guess extra rolls of toilet paper and back issues of Sports Illustrated aren’t the usual targets of a home invasion.’ Max’s comment wasn’t especially funny, but the bar for comedy in courtrooms was notoriously low, and the remark drew a chuckle from Judge Bandon. The point of the testimony was simple: the violent home invasion on May 27 of a seventh-floor condo overlooking Lafayette Street had nothing to do with poor Robert Mancini until Robo got caught in the crossfire. The bodyguard’s relationship to the apartment was too inconsequential – too tangential – for the dead man to have been the premeditated target of the four bullets that eventually penetrated his naked torso that night. No, the crime had nothing to do with Mancini. The real target was either a robbery or Sam Sparks himself, and robbery seemed unlikely. Despite the expensive furnishings – two flat-screen televisions, a top-of-the-line stereo system, the rug that doubled as art – nothing was missing from the apartment. So now the police wanted to know more about Sam Sparks. From the witness stand, Ellie eyed a silver picture frame behind the bench. In the photograph, a smiling Paul Bandon beamed alongside a perfect-looking wife and a teenage boy in a royal blue cap and gown. Outside this courtroom, underneath the robes, Bandon was a normal person with a real life and a family. She wondered, if she cut through the bull and laid it all out for him, whether Judge Bandon would understand how the series of events beginning on May 27 had led her to the middle of a battle between the district attorney’s office and one of the most powerful men in the city. Maybe he would understand how she had felt when Sparks had sauntered into the crime scene, in his custom-cut tuxedo, somehow dry and picture-ready on that rain-soaked night, so put out by the disturbance at his pristine penthouse. Maybe he could imagine the disdainful looks Sparks had given the police officers sullying his spotless pied-a-terre, the very officers who protected the appearance of order that allowed Sparks to earn billions in Manhattan real estate. Maybe he would realize that she hadn’t even meant to arrest Sparks and had immediately kicked herself for doing it. All she’d wanted was to wipe that smug look off his face, just long enough for him to give more of a rat’s ass about a dead man in his bedroom than the area rug in his foyer. If Ellie were telling the whole truth, she’d tell Judge Bandon that there was something about Sam Sparks that got under her skin. And she would try to explain that the only thing that bothered her more than that something was her own inability to maintain control in the face of it. Sparks’s rigid refusal to cooperate with the police investigation – all because of their first ill-fated encounter, an encounter in which she had played no small part – had contributed to a four-month investigation that led nowhere. ‘So, in sum, Detective Hatcher, would access to the financial and business records we are requesting from Mr. Sparks assist you with your investigation?’ Donovan asked. ‘We believe so,’ she said, now looking directly at Judge Bandon. ‘Mr. Sparks is, as we all know, an extremely successful man. A break-in at one of his showcase personal properties would send a message to him. If he has financial or business enemies, we need to look into that.’ ‘And to be clear, is Mr. Sparks himself a target of your investigation?’ ‘Of course not,’ Ellie said. If she were revealing the whole truth, she would have told Judge Bandon that at one point they of course had looked at Sparks as a suspect, but had quickly cleared him. ‘Is there anything you’d like to add to your testimony, Detective Hatcher?’ In polite courtroom discourse, ADA Max Donovan referred to her as Detective Hatcher. But this was not the whole truth, either. If courtrooms had anything to do with the whole truth, he would call her Ellie. And one of them might have to disclose the fact that, just that morning, the testifying detective had woken up naked in the assistant district attorney’s bed. ‘No, thank you, Mr. Donovan.’ Chapter Four (#ulink_e4f8601b-2c96-5c48-844b-a3b7952a009d) 11: 45 a.m. Megan Gunther rolled her fingertips lightly over the keyboard of her laptop computer. It was a nervous habit. If her typing fingers were positioned at the ready, she had a tendency to keep them moving – tiny little wiggles against the smooth black keys. She remembered begging her mother to teach her to type at the age of six. Her parents had just purchased a home computer, and Megan would eavesdrop as they sat side by side at her father’s desk, marveling at the wonders on the screen, all attributable to something called the Internet. But Megan had marveled at the speed of her mother’s fingers as they flew across the keyboard. She glanced at the round white clock that hung above the blank blackboard behind Professor Ellen Stein. Eleven forty-five. Fifteen more minutes. Thirty-five minutes of class had passed, and the only words on her laptop screen were ‘Life and Death’, followed by the date, followed by a single question: ‘Are all lives equally good?’ Megan had enrolled in this seminar because the catalog description had piqued her curiosity: ‘Is life inherently worthwhile, or only if the life lived is a good life? Is death necessarily negative? Is a life not lived superior to a life lived in vain?’ Megan was no philosophy major – she would declare biology next year, and her curriculum was designed specifically for premed. But that course description had grabbed her attention. She figured that it could only serve the medical profession well if a future doctor took the time to contemplate the larger meaning of life and death in addition to learning the science that could extend one and forestall the other. She should have foreseen, though, that a philosophy seminar with no prerequisites would devolve into a series of free-floating chat sessions during which unfocused undergrads – the ones who would eventually wind up behind a Starbucks counter, or perhaps in law school – attempted to show off their mastery of the most reductionist versions of the various branches of philosophy. Today’s class, as was often the case, had held momentary promise when Dr. Stein posed the question that was still staring at Megan from the screen of her laptop: ‘Are all lives equally good?’ Unfortunately, the first student to respond immediately played the Hitler card. As in, ‘Of course not. I mean, who here mourns the death of Hitler?’ After just three weeks of a single philosophy course, Megan was convinced that the quality of the national civic dialogue would be noticeably improved by a voluntary prohibition against all analogies to Nazi Germany. Poor Dr. Stein had done her best to steer the conversation on track, but then the girl who always wore overalls and patchouli oil had set off another frenzy of mental masturbation by wondering aloud whether the mentally disabled enjoyed their lives as much as ‘regular’ people. Megan found herself contemplating her fingers jiggling on the keyboard again. Not her fingers as much as the keyboard itself. The layout. She understood why the Q and the Z belonged to the whim of her left pinky; Hitler analogies were more common than the use of those letters. But what criteria had been used to determine the keys that would qualify for ‘home base’, as her mother had called it during her early touch-typing training? A, S, D, L – those she understood. But F and J? And the semicolon? How often did anyone use semicolons? She forced herself to tune back into the conversation around the seminar table. She gathered that the patchouli girl’s comment about the mentally disabled had set off a larger conversation about the value of knowledge when a guy with a paperboy hat and a beatnik growth of hair beneath his lip retorted, ‘Please, go read more Ayn Rand. You’re asked about lives without value, and you pick on the retarded? Of much more questionable value is a life spent absorbing knowledge but then doing absolutely nothing with it.’ At that, Megan thought she noticed a twitch in Dr. Stein’s left eye. Twenty minutes later, the class was still debating whether knowledge was worthy for its own sake, or merely as a means toward practical ends. ‘But even to differentiate between knowledge for its own sake and for its pragmatic import is a fiction,’ the patchouli woman insisted. ‘It assumes an objective reality that stands alone, independent of our own cognitive responses to it. We have no measure of reality other than through our own thoughts, so what precisely do you mean when you say “knowledge standing alone”? Knowledge is reality.’ ‘Only if you’re an epistemological idealist,’ the soul patch argued. ‘Maybe Kant would agree with that kind of logic, or even John Locke. But a realist would maintain that there is an ontological reality that is independent of our own experiences. And if we can set aside our narcissism for thirty seconds and accept that premise, then it’s not a lot to ask of the privileged elite that they use their knowledge to make a concrete, objective difference in that reality.’ ‘This might be slightly off topic –’ Megan felt her eyes rolling involuntarily away from the speaker, the decent-looking guy who always wore concert T-shirts. ‘This might be slightly off topic, but has anyone else wondered why John Locke on Lost is named John Locke? It explains the inconsistencies in the various narratives. The writers are telling us to take all those flashbacks and flash-forwards with a grain of salt; they are each filtered through the lens of the characters’ personal experiences.’ ‘Oh, my God. Did he really just say that?’ The whisper came from the student sitting next to Megan, a guy in a Philadelphia Flyers jersey with a serious case of bed head. ‘I should have saved my trust fund and gone to Penn.’ ‘Okay, people, time out.’ Stein rapped her knuckles against the tabletop to call the class to order. ‘Let’s get back to the original question.’ Megan wished she had a dollar for every time Dr. Stein had taken them ‘back to the original question’. The woman no doubt knew her shit, but she had to stop treating these morons as intellectual equals. If this group could be trusted with the amount of guidance provided by the original question, they wouldn’t be talking about Hitler, the mentally disabled, and a television show about island castaways. She finally caved to temptation and opened Internet Explorer on her laptop. Almost all of the university’s buildings were equipped with wireless Internet access, but a serious professor like Dr. Stein certainly expected her students to refrain from partaking during class time. Barely veiled surfing ran rampant, however, and to Megan it was no surprise. The university’s current regime was, in her view, no different from cutting lines of cocaine on the desktop in front of addicts and telling them not to snort. She moved her right hand onto the laptop’s mouse pad and checked her Gmail account while making a point of periodically looking up from her screen to deliver a pensive nod. From there, it was on to Perez Hilton’s site for the celebrity gossip. Then to Facebook, where it was her turn in the Scrabble game she was playing with Courtney. She knew that at some point Courtney’s decision not to attend NYU would cut back on their socializing, but for now they remained in daily online contact. Megan noticed that her neighbor with the bed head was eyeballing her computer screen. She was about to deliver her best warning glare when he nudged his notebook an inch in her direction. Beneath a series of doodled boxes and circles, he had jotted, ‘You missed HAYSEED for a bingo.’ She turned to her game and confirmed the mistake. Switching the laptop back to her blank class notes, she typed a sad face – a colon, followed by a dash and a left parenthesis. Her neighbor scribbled another note: ‘campusjuice. com.’ Megan clicked back to her browser, typed the Web site name into the address bar, and gently hit the enter key. ‘Campus Juice.’ White bubble letters against an orange background, followed by a slogan that said it all: ‘All the Juice, Always Anonymous.’ In the middle of the screen was a text box, labeled ‘Choose Your Campus.’ Megan typed in NYU and hit enter. Up came a message board consisting of a list of posts, each with its own subject title. Craziest Person in Your Dorm WTF?!: Did Brandon Saltzburg drop out? Freshman Fifteen (Plus Another Fifteen) Who’s Sluttier: Kelly Gotleib or Jenny Huntsman? Hottest profs. I’ve got a sex tape Michael Stuart gave me the clap Megan dropped her right hand beneath the seminar table and flashed a thumbs-up at her neighbor, who doodled an exclamation point in the margin of his notebook. She clicked on the link to pull up the thread concerning Michael Stuart and his supposed STD. The message had been posted an hour earlier, and two people had already responded – one alleging that Stuart lived in her dorm and was a rampant meth fiend, the other claiming to be Michael Stuart himself with some not-so-kind words about the original poster’s cottage cheese thighs. Megan scrolled through the next three pages of posts. The entire site was devoted to on-campus gossip, insults, and attacks – all naming real names, and yet capable of being posted with complete anonymity if the author so chose. She had just finished perusing one of the more respectable threads – speculation about the identity of this year’s commencement speaker – when the title of another post grabbed her attention. She stared at the two words on the screen: Megan Gunther. Moving the cursor to the hyperlink, she could not bring herself to click on the text. Something inside of her – whatever instincts humans possess for emotional self-preservation – told her that one click would change everything. She didn’t want to read whatever had been written there for the entire world to see. Megan jerked at the sound of a book being dropped on the table. She looked up to see Ellen Stein’s eyes directed at her, along with nineteen younger, conspiratorial faces smirking at her embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, Ms. Gunther. Are we interrupting your computer research?’ Chapter Five (#ulink_0078b55f-e324-5b0b-84bf-3fe6f2427260) Noon Ellie had barely made her way from the witness chair to her seat on a bench behind Max Donovan before Judge Bandon opened the floor to argument. As Ellie had predicted, and as Max had warned, Sparks’s lawyer was casting her as some kind of rogue cop on a single-minded anti-Sparks mission: Mark Fuhrman in the O J Simpson trial minus the race stuff. The lawyer’s name was Ramon Guerrero. According to Max, Guerrero was a hard-line anticommunist from Miami who had first applied to law school to help other Cubans apply for political asylum but, as lawyers often do, had since forged another – and more lucrative – path. Now he was one of the few corner-office partners at a five-hundred-plus-attorney law firm who had actual trial experience. He was the charismatic guy the eggheads brought in when the documents had been reviewed, briefs had been filed, depositions were over, and it was time to talk to a judge or a jury. And on this particular afternoon he found himself in Paul Bandon’s courtroom, demonizing Ellie Hatcher. ‘Your Honor, the only reason the NYPD hasn’t made more progress investigating the tragic murder of Mr. Mancini is that the lead detectives, most notably Detective Hatcher, decided early on that wherever Sam Sparks appears, Sam Sparks must be the story. Rather than fully investigate the possibility that someone out there wanted to see Robert Mancini dead – someone violent, someone who’s still at large – they want to pursue a fishing expedition through confidential business and financial records.’ ‘With all due respect to Mr. Guerrero,’ Donovan said, rising from counsel’s chair, ‘this is not the kind of contractual dispute that he and Mr. Sparks are used to dealing with. This is a murder investigation. And, as you and I both know from the myriad of murder cases we have seen, murder victims – and the people close to them – lose their privacy as a result of the violence directed against them. You have signed countless search warrants for victims’ homes, offices, cars…’ As Donovan continued to hammer away at the list, Ellie’s gaze shifted from the Bic Rollerball braced in his hand to Guerrero’s Montblanc. ‘Police pore over every document and cookie stored inside a victim’s computer. We review every bank record, phone log, and credit card bill. And it’s all a matter of routine, Your Honor. We’re only here because Sam Sparks is…well, he’s Sam Sparks.’ ‘The problem with your analysis, Mr. Donovan, is that Sam Sparks was not the victim of this crime. Robert Mancini was.’ ‘Sparks was a victim, Your Honor. It was his eight-million-dollar apartment that was stormed into. It was his apartment that was riddled with bullet holes.’ ‘But it was not his body in the bed,’ Judge Bandon replied. ‘No, but the police believe it was intended to be.’ ‘Precisely. That is what the police believe. And usually when we talk about what the police believe, we subject that belief to a standard of probable cause. I don’t see probable cause to search through the personal records of Sam Sparks.’ ‘Exactly,’ Guerrero chimed in. ‘But, Your Honor, Mr. Sparks is not a suspect. If that’s his concern, we can work out an immunity agreement to placate Mr. Guerrero.’ ‘Immunity?’ Guerrero asked. ‘Immunity? The last thing Sam Sparks needs is for some newspaper to report that he has received immunity in a murder case. As the police themselves have acknowledged, he had nothing to do with the events at his apartment on May 27. Because he’s at no risk of criminal charges for those events, immunity from prosecution is worthless to him.’ Guerrero pressed his weight into his hands on counsel table and leaned forward for emphasis. ‘The government fails to appreciate the importance of public opinion and the privacy of information to Sam Sparks’s significant net worth. His real estate holdings are valuable, yes. But as we all know, the real value to the industry that is Sam Sparks lies in his reputation as a businessman. The fact that someone was shot at one of his properties is not great PR. But if the police are actually investigating Mr. Sparks – even as a potential target – then, before you know it, people are speculating about improperly financed debt, the Mafia…who knows what? And of course the risks of disclosure of information regarding pending deals cannot be understated in this kind of market.’ Ellie found herself tiring of the invest-in-Sam-Sparks-for-your-future sales presentation and began doodling on the notepad she had removed from her purse. She let her gaze move to the left, where the head of what Sparks Industries called its Corporate Security Division, Nick Dillon, sat on a bench behind Sparks and Guerrero. Before Dillon was associated with either Sparks or Mancini, he’d been a member of the NYPD. After a stint working for a private military contractor, he’d moved on to Sparks. Now he was one of those lucky former cops who collected both a city pension and a private paycheck. Dillon had been Mancini’s immediate supervisor. He had also been his friend. Ellie and Rogan had spoken to Dillon at least once a week since that initial callout four months earlier. He had done his best to play mediator, but they’d nevertheless wound up here in court. Dillon nodded along with Guerrero’s argument, but Ellie knew from earlier conversations that Dillon would like nothing more than to elbow his boss in the throat for his refusal to cooperate with the police. She liked the image. ‘Your Honor,’ Max protested, ‘counsel’s argument assumes that any information disclosed as part of this investigation will become public. The suggestion is an insult to the fine detectives who have worked –’ ‘Which brings us back to Detective Hatcher,’ Guerrero jumped in. ‘Our background information shows that in the short time she’s been in the homicide division, her name has appeared in forty-nine newspaper articles in a LexisNexis search. Prior to that, she granted various interviews to outlets like People magazine and Dateline NBC about her own family background –’ Ellie looked up abruptly from her notepad. Dillon glanced over with a barely perceptible shrug. The thought of his coaster-sized elbow crushing Sparks’s windpipe was growing more appealing by the second. ‘Counsel’s comments are wholly inappropriate,’ Max said. Complete and utter bullshit. She continued to scribble as she listened to her boyfriend’s voice rise half an octave. ‘Two of the NYPD’s biggest collars in the last year. A Police Combat Cross for rescuing another officer in the line of duty. Personal interviews granted only at her peril and only to help her mother, who was widowed in Kansas when –’ Judge Bandon cut him off. ‘I’ve been known to read the occasional People magazine myself. I’m familiar with the circumstances of her father’s death.’ ‘My point,’ Guerrero continued, ‘is that Detective Hatcher is relatively inexperienced, and although she has created quite a record for herself in a short period of time, she also has a knack for finding herself in the public eye. She also made it clear with her outrageous arrest of my client that she has a personal grudge against him.’ ‘I would hardly call it an arrest,’ Max argued. ‘She placed him in loosened handcuffs after he twice disobeyed a request that he leave the crime scene. Once he was out of the apartment and in the hallway, she immediately removed the cuffs and gave Mr. Sparks another opportunity to stay out of the way, which he wisely took advantage of. Any other citizen in the same situation would have spent the night in Central Booking.’ Judge Bandon cut him off. ‘Are you seriously suggesting that Mr. Sparks should be treated just like any ordinary citizen?’ Max had warned Ellie that Judge Bandon might be starstruck by Sparks, but she had never imagined that she would hear a judge admit on open record the favoritism shown to the rich and powerful. She turned to glance at Genna Walsh, who was shaking her head in disgust. ‘What I mean to say,’ the judge said, catching himself, ‘is that Mr. Sparks was at that point known to Detective Hatcher, both as the owner of the property in question and as a respected member of this community. Those considerations would appear to undercut her decision to arrest him, however briefly. I must admit, I am troubled by what I see here.’ ‘As well you should be,’ Guerrero added. ‘That same obsession with Mr. Sparks that caused her to jump the gun on that first night has distorted this investigation from the outset. Your Honor, we are outsiders to this investigation, and even we are aware of at least two far more credible theories as to motive for Robert Mancini’s murder.’ Guerrero ticked off his theories on two stubby fingers. ‘First, the police still – four months after the murder – have not identified the woman who by all appearances had sexual relations with the victim prior to the murder. Second, and separately, we have recently learned that the NYPD is conducting a drug investigation of the apartment directly next door to the apartment where this murder occurred.’ The movement of Ellie’s pen against her notebook stopped. ‘Could this have been a home invasion at the wrong address?’ Guerrero continued. ‘Have the police looked into that possibility?’ Home invasions were often the m.o. of choice in drug-related robberies, so one of the first steps she and Rogan had taken was to look into the possibility of a mistaken entry. Immediately after the murder, she had personally checked the department’s database of ongoing drug investigations. They even reached out to Narcotics to be certain. They found no addresses that might have been confused with Sparks’s apartment, let alone one on the very same floor. ‘With these two very important unanswered questions, Your Honor, it strikes us as quite audacious indeed for the police and the district attorney’s office to stand here demanding private information from my client as part of a fishing expedition while a killer runs free.’ ‘I don’t like it either,’ Judge Bandon said, settling back into his overstuffed leather-backed chair. ‘The court is granting Mr. Sparks’s motion to quash the state’s subpoena –’ ‘But, Your Honor –’ ‘I’ve heard enough, Mr. Donovan. Interrupt me again, and there will be consequences. Under Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, the prosecution does have a right to obtain evidence from nonsuspect third parties, but only upon a showing of probable cause that the party has actual evidence to be found. There has been no such showing here. A written order will follow.’ Max lowered his head momentarily before he began packing his hearing materials into a brown leather briefcase. It was a subtle movement, but Ellie noticed. He was disappointed, and not merely about the court’s ruling. He’d warned her that morning that their chances weren’t good. But that small motion revealed a worry that he had let her down. He glanced over his shoulder in her direction. His brown curly hair was bushier than usual; for a week he’d been trying to find time for a trim. His gray eyes looked tired, but when she lifted her chin toward him and winked, they smiled back at her. The private exchange did not last long. ‘Your Honor!’ Guerrero’s exclamation was quickly followed by an audible sucking of air from Sam Sparks. They were both staring at her notebook, still open on her lap beneath her pen. She felt Judge Bandon’s eyes follow their gaze. ‘I take it there’s more to see than tic-tac-toe boards and vector cubes?’ Silence fell across the courtroom. ‘Your notes, please, Detective Hatcher.’ It took him only the briefest glance before he called her back up to the witness stand. ‘I have a few questions of my own, Detective.’ Chapter Six (#ulink_b23dbfbc-5d0b-5361-a8fb-4f3dcab0c6ed) 2:45 p.m. Megan Gunther The twelve letters formed just two words – one name – on a screen filled with many other words about scores of other people on the NYU campus. But those two words – her name, as the header on a subject link of the Campus Juice Web site – had made the last three hours the longest one hundred and eighty minutes of her lifetime. Megan had closed her laptop the second that Professor Ellen Stein busted her. But that hadn’t stopped Stein from instructing her to stay late after class – an example to all the other seminar students who might have been tempted to ignore the class discussion in favor of more interesting online material. By the time Stein had finished lecturing her on the importance of group discussion and the empirical research demonstrating the deleterious effects of multitasking on learning, Megan was running late for her biochem lab. She would have blown off a lecture, but the labs counted for 60 percent of her grade and couldn’t be made up. And med schools would care about her biochem grade. No, the lab couldn’t be skipped. And it was impossible to juggle her computer while titrating liquids and triggering chemical reactions over a Bunsen burner. Now she had finally made it back to her building on Fourteenth Street, three hours after first seeing her name posted on a Web site that promoted itself as the home of the country’s juiciest campus gossip. She walked quickly through the lobby, pressed the elevator call button, and then pushed it several more times as she watched the digital readout on the elevator tick down to the lobby level. As she rode up to the fourth floor, she pulled her laptop and keys from her bag. She slipped a key into the doorknob – she never bothered with the other locks – and turned. Once inside the apartment, she glanced at what had once been the empty bedroom, the one that now belonged to her roommate. Megan’s parents had originally justified the purchase of this two-bedroom condo as both an investment while Megan attended college and also a place for them to stay when they visited the city. But with the economy down and Manhattan rents still sky-high, the prospect of additional cash flow outweighed the Gunthers’ desire for a room of their own in the Big Apple: Megan had to tolerate a roommate after all. Heather called the first day the ad hit Craig’s List in May. She was transferring into NYU in the fall and seemed pretty normal, so Megan went with her gut. The truth was, Heather was easy to tolerate. Today, as on almost every other day, Megan returned home to find Heather’s door closed and the apartment quiet and in exactly the same condition she’d left it. Whether Heather was out or at home, this was the usual state of their shared home. Sometimes Megan wished Heather would come out of her shell and start treating this as her apartment, too, but today she was grateful that her roommate kept to herself. Inside her own room, she closed the door, flopped down on top of her pale yellow bedspread, and opened her laptop. The connection to her wireless network seemed to take forever. Once the signal was finally established, she opened Internet Explorer, clicked on her history bar, and scrolled down to www.campusjuice.com. She navigated her way to the NYU message board. All of the posts on the first page were new, entered within the last three hours. She clicked through the board, searching for her name again. What had once appeared on the fifth page of the forum was now on the seventh. The site was clearly getting some use. She moved the cursor to her hyperlinked name, took a deep breath, and clicked. 11:10 AM – noon? Life and Death Seminar 12:10–3 PM? Bio Chemistry Lab 3–7 PM? Break: Home to 14th Street? 7–8 PM? Spinning at Equinox The schedule was hers, down to her five-times-weekly cycling classes at the gym. Whoever posted the message obviously knew her comings and goings. They also knew where she lived, or at least which street. The short message was detailed enough to convince her that the final line of the post was no exaggeration: Megan Gunther, someone is watching Chapter Seven (#ulink_95a7d88c-4a6a-587b-9f56-e862514da272) Thursday, September 25 2:00 p.m. Rogan snatched a gallon-size Ziploc bag from the grasp of the booking clerk at 100 Centre Street. ‘I’d get that smile off your face real fast, son.’ The clerk lowered his eyes and continued to complete the release form Ellie would sign as the official termination of her sentence for contempt of court. ‘“What if Sparks did it?”’ Rogan asked Ellie in a hushed voice. ‘How about, what in the big bad fuck were you thinking?’ What if Sparks did it? It had been a little more than twenty-four hours since Judge Paul Bandon read those words in Ellie’s notebook. She had scribbled them next to a cartoon drawing of a stick figure with stubbly hair and a striped jumpsuit, standing behind prison bars. ‘Apparently I was thinking that we’d been too quick to give Sparks a pass.’ She removed her tiny gold hoop earrings from the plastic bag and began looping them through her lobes. Rogan held the bridge of his nose and shook his head. ‘Like jewelry’s gonna do anything for you looking like that.’ Partners were like families that way: the booking clerk had best keep his mouth shut, but for Rogan, the subject of her incarceration was fair game. Ellie had been replaying the scene in the courtroom for twenty-four hours, and she still couldn’t believe Bandon had pulled the trigger on her. She was convinced that until that moment – when Bandon had said, ‘Your notes please, Detective Hatcher’ – she hadn’t even been aware of the words and images that were forming in her scribbles. Her mistake had been trying to persuade Bandon of that fact. If she had simply admitted to carrying vague suspicions that she hadn’t disclosed on the stand, she probably would have gotten off with a lecture. But instead Ellie had tried to explain. And Bandon, instead of understanding, had accused her of being ‘cute’. And then when she argued even more insistently, as Max tried to quiet her down, Bandon had concluded that she was lying. To him. Personally. And that, no judge would tolerate. And now because Bandon thought she was a liar, she had spent the night in a holding cell. ‘No bo-hunk boyfriend to bail you out?’ Rogan asked. ‘You didn’t bail me out. I was released after fully serving my twenty-four-hour sentence.’ ‘Whatever. Where’s your man, Max?’ ‘I didn’t want to chance Bandon finding out about us. I’m obviously on his shit list now. No need to add Max to that picture. Besides, you’re the one who insisted on picking me up. I could’ve gotten back to the precinct on my own.’ ‘What? And miss the opportunity of you doing the walk of shame in your jelly slippers?’ Ellie looked down at her black leather flats, happy to have her own shoes back. ‘Please tell me that smell in my nostrils is just the memory of my overnight sojourn at the lovely Centre Street inn.’ ‘Sorry, chica. I’m afraid you absorbed the permeating funk of your surrounding atmosphere.’ ‘I’m so happy that my personal and professional misery has brought you such happiness.’ ‘So are you going to explain those notes that landed you in this shit pile?’ ‘My mind was wandering in court. We both get some of our best ideas when we aren’t even trying.’ ‘Are you forgetting that we looked real close at him early on? Real close.’ Rogan’s arms were crossed, fingertips tucked beneath his underarms. Always well dressed, today Rogan wore a black wool suit, a crisp lavender dress shirt, and an Herm?s tie worth more than Ellie’s entire outfit. He might have a cop’s blue-collar values, but, thanks to a grandmother who married well late in life, he could live beyond a cop’s salary. ‘Look, you mind if we talk about this in a slightly less depressing environment?’ Ellie led the way out of the holding floor onto the street, and Rogan didn’t stop her. By the time they reached the fleet car that Rogan had parked on Centre Street, she was ready to talk. ‘So we took a look at Sparks and cleared him.’ Rogan glanced back at the building from which they had just exited. ‘Pretty sure I was the one saying that back there a couple of minutes ago.’ ‘Keys.’ She held up her right hand for the catch. In the six-plus months they’d been partners in the homicide task force of the Manhattan South Detective Borough, Ellie was usually happy to leave the driving to Rogan, but after the last twenty-four hours, she wanted control over her own movements. Rogan obliged, tossing the keys across the hood. ‘We’ve had this case four months now,’ she said, turning over the ignition as Rogan climbed into the passenger’s seat. ‘We checked out the obvious angles first: sex and money.’ A guy gets filled with bullets after leaving his semen inside a knotted condom on the nightstand, and the first theory is sex. But when it came to sex, everyone who knew Robert Mancini said he was uncomplicated. Thirty years old. Unmarried since a starter marriage to a high school sweetheart had ended eight years earlier. No children. If he had a girlfriend – and he didn’t at the time of his death – he was with that woman, and that woman only. If he didn’t have a girlfriend, he hooked up and made it clear that hooking up was all he was interested in. Apparently there was no shortage of women willing to play by those ground rules. Unfortunately, they’d been unable to locate the woman who played the game that particular night. The 212’s overnight doorman had no memory of either her or Mancini, and had since been fired for routinely leaving his post to play video games with the teenage son of a tenant. Without a video recorder, the building’s monitoring system was useless, and Mancini’s phone records and e-mail messages had also led nowhere. Then there was money. But again, with money, the picture seemed equally uncomplicated. Mancini had been working at Sparks Industries for almost a year before his death. Prior to that, he’d served in the U.S. Army, where he met a private contract worker named Nick Dillon in Afghanistan. When Dillon hung up the Middle Eastern travel and became the head of the corporate security division of Sparks Industries, he offered Mancini a job back home, which Mancini accepted as soon as his military commitment was up. His salary was in the low one hundreds, a figure that Rogan and Ellie had confirmed as the going rate for a decent corporate security gig. He owned a two-bedroom condo in Hoboken, only two and a half miles from the childhood home where his sister’s family still lived. He was up to date on a moderate mortgage. He had no unusual debts, no irregularities in his bank records. ‘Sex and money didn’t get us shit,’ Rogan said. ‘And when sex and money and gambling didn’t get us shit, we took a close look at Sam Sparks and cleared him. I think that’s now the third time we’ve agreed on that.’ But the notes Ellie had scribbled during the motion hearing were asking them to revisit that determination. And Rogan wanted to know why. As she drove up Centre Street, Ellie hit the flashing lights on the dash to cut through the standstill traffic that was blocking the intersection at Canal through Chinatown. ‘We looked at Sparks before he decided to stonewall us. Now that we know just how much he wants to be off our radar, we have to look at him again.’ ‘Holy crap, Hatcher. Rogan told us you got into some shit at the courthouse, but we didn’t think he meant literally.’ John Shannon was a portly detective with light blond hair and ruddy skin. He sat directly behind Ellie in the squad room and had a bottle-a-week Old Spice habit. ‘I got two hours of sleep on a mattress thinner than the layer of fat around your neck, Shannon; haven’t eaten since I bit into the mystery meat burger they handed me for dinner; and spent the last twenty-four hours in city-issued underwear approximating the consistency of eighty-grit sandpaper –’ ‘And she’s still better looking than anyone you ever dated, Shannon,’ Rogan interjected. ‘I’m just saying, cut me some frickin’ slack.’ Rogan draped his suit jacket on the back of his chair. As he took a seat at the gray metal desk that faced Ellie’s, he threw Shannon a look that sent the detective’s attention back to his own work. ‘Just because the man’s stonewalling us doesn’t mean he’s our guy.’ Rogan reached for a tin of Altoids on his desk and popped a mint in his mouth. ‘Rich assholes shit on us all the time. They usually aren’t murderers. You don’t think this has something to do with Bandon throwing you in the clink?’ She gave him her middle finger and her friendliest smile. ‘Did I say anything about investigating Bandon? I’m talking about Sparks. All we wanted was a closer look at his financials. Just a way to check on his enemies. Why go to court over something like that?’ ‘Donovan said going into it that we were probably going to lose. We didn’t have probable cause.’ She opened her top desk drawer and removed a jar of Nutella. She’d long ago given up offering any to Rogan.‘So?’ she asked.‘Most innocent people cooperate with us even when we don’t have squat.’ ‘Like I said, not the assholes.’ ‘No, but even the jerks usually have a reason. I was sitting in the courtroom watching Guerrero bill four hundred dollars an hour to fight us. Sparks even showed up personally, and his time’s got to be worth way more than Guerrero’s. Why?’ Ellie’s father had always told her that the key to good police work was to scrutinize people’s motives. ‘Find the motive,’ he used to say, ‘and the motive will lead you to the man.’ She understood why the innocent citizens of Bushwick didn’t cooperate when some Trinitarios took out another banger. In a neighborhood run by gangs, a conversation with the police could be followed by a knock on the door in the middle of the night by a machete-wielding messenger. She even understood when some corporate bureaucrat wouldn’t open the company records without a warrant. Regular people had jobs to protect. But Sparks wasn’t a regular person. He was the boss. He was a billionaire. This was his call, and he’d made the wrong one. Rogan leaned his weight back in his chair and rested his palms on top of his closely shaved scalp. ‘Sparks showed up personally, huh?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Shit,’ he said, letting his weight bring his chair back to the floor. He pointed a finger at her across the desk. ‘You know I never liked Sparks for it.’ From the very beginning, Rogan had firmly believed that a man as savvy as Sam Sparks wouldn’t eliminate a threat inside an apartment he owned. She, however, had believed it was just the kind of reverse psychology that someone as arrogant as Sparks would employ. Me? But why would I draw attention to myself by having the man killed inside my own apartment? ‘J. J., you know as well as I do how quickly we eliminated him as a suspect. All that mattered to us was the time line, the call records, and the personal assistant.’ The same assistant was in charge of both Sparks’s personal calendar and the schedule for the 212. According to her, Mancini hadn’t asked to use the apartment until 2:30 on the day of the murder, and she had never mentioned it to Sparks. She insisted that Sparks could not have known that Mancini would be at the apartment that night. And because they had scratched Sparks from the list of possible suspects, they had never scratched beneath the surface of Sparks’s public persona to unearth whatever secrets Mancini could have stumbled on. ‘You win,’ Rogan said. ‘We look at Sparks again.’ Ellie smiled as she took another bite of Nutella. ‘You go tell the Lou, though. She was on the warpath yesterday.’ ‘At me or Bandon?’ ‘A little of both. A lot of both, actually. She’ll want to know you’re back.’ ‘Yeah, okay.’ She started toward her lieutenant’s office, but then turned again to face Rogan. ‘Do me a favor?’ ‘Burn those clothes you’re wearing?’ ‘Track down that guy we talked to in May at Narcotics. Tell him to expect us at about’ – she looked at her watch and calculated the time she’d need for another stop –‘five o’clock.’ ‘Any hint as to why?’ ‘In court, Sparks’s lawyer claimed we’ve got an investigation running on the apartment next door.’ ‘And how would he know that?’ ‘We figure that out after we see if he’s right.’ Chapter Eight (#ulink_ad4c1202-029d-5fbe-bc2f-fe3cdb139fa7) 3:00 p.m. Ellie rapped her knuckles against the glass window that separated Lieutenant Robin Tucker’s office from the cramped detective squad, packed as it was with unmatched desks, dilapidated chairs, and the chaos of eighteen homicide detectives working out of a single room. She swept her bangs to the side as she watched through the glass. Tucker’s head tilted ever so slightly toward her office door. ‘It’s open,’ she called out, still reading whatever report she held between her fingertips. ‘Afternoon, Lou. Rogan says you wanted to touch base?’ Tucker set the document down on her desk. ‘Did you really need your partner to tell you that, given what happened in court yesterday?’ Ellie had finally won over her former lieutenant three short months before he was demoted due to an internal affairs investigation, the details of which were still wholly unknown and therefore rampant fodder for the NYPD rumor mill. When she found out that her new lieutenant was called Robin Tucker, she had assumed that the gender-ambiguous name belonged to a man. Statistical odds. But when Ellie learned that this particular Robin was of the female variety, she was optimistic. Maybe her luck would be better with a woman as a supervisor. Unfortunately, though, Ellie’s problems were with authority, not men. ‘No, Lou. Just making sure Rogan got credit for keeping me in check.’ ‘If you were in check, you might not have spent the night in jail for contempt of court.’ Ellie pressed her lips together. Explanations had done nothing to help her with Judge Bandon. She wasn’t going to waste her breath attempting to persuade Tucker that the judge had overreacted. Tucker looked Ellie in the eye during the silence. Ellie knew from asking around that her lieutenant was forty-eight years old, but her makeup-less skin was clear and bright. Her wavy hair had probably been shiny and blond years before turning to its current wiry mix of gray and light brown. She gave Ellie a nod. ‘Actually, a little bird already told me that the judge teed off on you for no good reason.’ Ellie shut her eyes and thought about the ribbing she was going to get in the house if Max called her lieutenant in an attempt to protect her. Then as quickly as the idea had come to her, she rejected it. Max knew better. ‘You know Nick Dillon.’ The way Ellie said it, it wasn’t a question. As an ex-cop, the head of Sparks Industries’ Corporate Security Division would know more than a few former colleagues at the NYPD. ‘We were both in the Seventh when I was just a rookie. He called this morning looking for your Lou. I guess he wanted to save you from a month’s worth of desk duty. Anyway, we recognized each other’s names from back in the day.’ Tucker’s affect changed as she spoke about Dillon – her eyes softened, the corners of her lips raised into a slight smile – and Ellie noticed for the first time that with a little effort her lieutenant could be attractive. ‘He’s been pretty decent to Rogan and me.’ ‘He’s a good guy. When he called, he gave me a heads-up that Sparks may go back to court to get access to our evidence.’ ‘On what basis?’ ‘Given where you spent the last twenty-four hours, do you really think Sam Sparks considers himself bound by the usual rules?’ ‘Valid point.’ A week earlier, Ellie had read online that Sparks was in negotiations for a reality show in which contestants would show off their eye for potential real estate jackpots. Sparks would supervise their work, like Donald Trump on The Apprentice, but meaner and with better hair. ‘Dillon knows it’s futile. No court will give Sparks what he wants, no matter how much he pays his lawyers to go through the motions.’ ‘But Dillon does know you from back at the Seventh.’ ‘Exactly. A guy like Dillon doesn’t chat up someone like me just for shits and giggles. Someone who looked like you? Now that would be different.’ Ellie was used to her fellow cops making remarks about her looks. She would probably always look a little bit like the girl who was once the runner-up in the Junior Miss Wichita pageant. But what she usually chose to take as a compliment sounded like a dig coming from Tucker. ‘So Dillon was sniffing around to see what he might turn up?’ she asked. ‘Yeah, I actually felt sorry for the guy. You can tell he thinks Sparks is a schmuck. I guess Sparks wants everything we know about the missing girl. He figures that if he can find her, we’ll work that angle and forget about him.’ ‘That’s a dead end. We’ve got the latents from the champagne flute and the DNA on the outside of the condom, but no hits on either one. She’s a mystery woman.’ Ellie hadn’t been particularly surprised. In a criminal justice system dominated by male perpetrators, and with a DNA database consisting almost entirely of sex offenders, striking a hit on a female subject was rare. ‘I guess when you’ve got enough money, the sky’s the limit,’ Tucker said. ‘He wants Dillon to work the case from beginning to end with his own people. You know, Dillon spent ten years between homicide and special victims before he went private. I got the impression the work in the private sector was pretty high-speed – corporate kidnapping prevention. He’s a good cop.’ ‘Except he’s not a cop. He’s been a ten with me and Rogan, but he’s still a guy making four times what you’re pulling in, doing half the amount of work, for some rich prick who thinks he’s entitled to more safety than regular people.’ ‘Tell me how you really feel, Detective.’ ‘I just did. Because for a second there it actually sounded like you wanted us to share our evidence with Sam Sparks.’ ‘No, I don’t. I was, however, suggesting that a cop with those kinds of years under his belt might catch the sort of details that a less experienced detective – someone who got promoted too early, someone who was the brass’s darling – might miss.’ ‘Seriously, I’ve got to defend Rogan here. He put in his dues.’ Tucker was unamused. ‘So what’s the next move?’ ‘Rogan and I were thinking we’d take another look at Sparks.’ She set out her theory that Sparks’s resistance to their investigation could have more to do with his role in Mancini’s death than any concern for privacy. ‘For what it’s worth, I told Dillon we wouldn’t be giving his boss special treatment.’ ‘So we’re a go?’ Ellie asked. She nodded. ‘But I also told him you’d continue to work every angle. Don’t just focus on Sparks. And I don’t want to hear from anyone in the house that you’re shucking off new cases, either. We stopped pushing full-time on this two months ago.’ ‘We know.’ ‘And watch your back, Hatcher. You already spent one night in jail. I’d hate to see what Sam Sparks could do if he was really pissed off.’ Chapter Nine (#ulink_16defda5-1ecf-5ea4-9058-7ca6bc5b48ea) 3:00 p.m. Megan Gunther stood in the lobby of the Sixth Precinct, fighting back the tears that were pooling in her eyes and threatening to roll down her reddened cheeks. ‘What do you mean, there’s nothing you can do?’ She had never seen her father like this. Jonas Gunther was an insurance man. That wasn’t to say he was weak – quite the opposite, in fact. He was a man of principle, who valued character above all else. At work, he expected others to live up to their word. In his personal life, he expected people to do what was right. And he did not hesitate to stand up to those who failed to deliver on his expectations. But Megan’s father, however forceful he could be about making a point, was always in control. Strong, but subdued. Emotions, he would tell her, got in the way of an effective argument. Today, though, Jonas Gunther was emotional. Megan’s mother, Patricia, placed a comforting arm around her daughter’s shoulder and gave her a squeeze. She stroked her straight blond hair and told her that everything would be all right. ‘We don’t know everything will be all right, Patty. That’s why we’re here. Things don’t become all right just because we hope for them to be. They become all right when the men and women who have sworn to protect and serve us pay attention when someone is threatening another citizen.’ Megan noticed a woman and her young son seated on a bench on the other side of the lobby watching them, alarm registered on their faces. The child dropped his gaze and burrowed his cheeks against his mother’s abdomen. ‘Mr. Gunther, I understand your frustration, but I need you to lower your voice right now.’ According to the metal nameplate affixed to his uniform, the desk sergeant trying to calm Megan’s father was called Martinez. His words did nothing to mitigate Jonas’s anger. ‘When I told my daughter to call the police two and a half hours ago, I expected an officer to go to her apartment to start an investigation. Then she tells me she’s required to come into the precinct, so her mother and I drove into the city from New Jersey, expecting something to be done about this. My daughter has done everything one could ask of her. She missed a biochem lab today. She found each and every mention of her name on this disgusting Web site. She printed out copies for you.’ He shook the quarter-inch stack of paper for emphasis. ‘And now you tell us there’s nothing you can do to protect her?’ ‘Sir, I’ve tried to explain, we have received more than our fair share of calls in this precinct from other NYU students, all complaining about what people are saying about them on this very Web site. And we’ve run our options past the district attorney’s office, and the same problems are going to apply here. First of all, the site doesn’t require users to give a name, address – anything. It’s totally anonymous.’ Jonas was already shaking his head. ‘That’s not true, that’s not true. I called the IT person at my company, and they tell me there are options. There’s a way to track – you can track the IQ or something like that. What’s it called again, honey?’ ‘IP address, Dad.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, pointing to Sergeant Martinez.‘The Web site should have that information. You can use it to –’ ‘And that’s the second problem, sir. This company is not willing to release that information without a subpoena –’ ‘So go get a fucking subpoena.’ Megan flinched. Except for the time her cousin had head-butted her father with his first catcher’s helmet, she couldn’t remember ever hearing her dad use the F word. ‘Let the man talk, Jonas. Please.’ Megan’s father set his jaw. He was clearly angry, but at least he was being quiet. For now. Sergeant Martinez gave Patricia Gunther an appreciative glance. ‘We can only get a subpoena if we have cause. And, as difficult as I’m sure it is for your daughter – for you, Megan – to read something like this on the Internet, the posts are not directly threatening.’ ‘But my schedule. Someone’s watching me.’ ‘You said yourself that everyone who knows you knows your class schedule and your workout routine. Unfortunately, messing with someone’s head isn’t a crime. If you’ve had any disputes with anyone lately – a former friend, a boy –’ ‘There are no disputes, Officer.’ Jonas was interrupting again. ‘My daughter has no idea who would do something like this. You have to listen to us.’ ‘That’s true, sir, and I have. I have listened now for more than twenty-five minutes. And I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do for you today. If it’s of any consolation, you might want to take a closer look at the other stuff on that site. A whole bunch of it is even worse than what your daughter’s going through.’ He looked directly at Megan. ‘You can’t let this get to you.’ ‘You can’t just make us leave,’ her father said. ‘You must –’ With just the placement of her hand on her husband’s forearm, Patricia Gunther silenced him. ‘Do you have a daughter, Sergeant Martinez?’ Martinez cleared his throat and then looked Megan’s mother in the eye. ‘I do, ma’am. She’s fifteen years old. So pretty, it scares me. And if you ask me as a father, I’d say the scumbags who run this Web site should all find Molotov cocktails in their cars tomorrow morning. But if you ask me as the desk sergeant of the Sixth Precinct, there’s nothing more I can do for you folks. I’m sorry.’ As Megan led the way out of the precinct, she reread the final page she had printed about herself from campusjuice.com. She had printed not just the original posts, but also the comments that had been posted by other users in reply: Post 11:10 AM – noon? Life and Death Seminar 12:10–3 PM? Bio Chemistry Lab 3–7 PM? Break: Home to 14th Street? 7–8 PM? Spinning at Equinox Megan Gunther, someone is watching Comments: Seriously, Dude, what is up with you? I’m in Math 210 with her and she’s not even hot. Go have your rape fantasies on someone else. Both the original comment and the reply were obviously posted by a couple of virgins who need to get a life, and some respect for womyn. Got stalk? Yo, this site is whack. Not to kill the party, but does this chick know about this? Maybe someone should notify campus security? Looks odd to me… Reply to Comments: Good luck with security. You’re all anonymous, and so am I. They’ll never find me. And neither will Megan. As Megan left the overhead fluorescent lights of the Sixth Precinct and stepped into the gray overcast of West Tenth Street, she stopped fighting the wave of emotion that had been building in her since she had first spotted her name on that vile Web site. She did not try to choke back the sob in her chest. She let the tears begin to roll. Chapter Ten (#ulink_c7de809a-ce04-5150-8bc9-226ebeb38c0f) 3:15 p.m. Katie Battle rang the doorbell first, just to be safe, and then slipped the key into the lock. She enjoyed a mental sigh of relief when she felt the familiar tumble of the interior pins. She couldn’t count the number of times she had schlepped a client to a showing, only to learn that the seller had left the wrong keys with the doorman. ‘Hello?’ she called out through the cracked door. Another annoyance avoided; the sellers were out of the apartment, as promised. ‘So this one’s just over eleven hundred square feet, which means you could easily convert it to a two-bedroom.’ Her clients today were Don and Laura Jenning, who were looking to purchase their first New York City apartment. Some clients came to Katie with a sophisticated understanding of the market, formed through countless hours perusing the New York Times real estate section and the plethora of Web sites devoted exclusively to property listings. The Jennings were not that type of client. ‘Wow,’ Laura said. ‘This is so much nicer than the other ones.’ ‘I wanted you to see it, just to give you an idea of the difference it can make if you’re willing to stretch.’ Katie, of course, was not surprised that the apartment – a large one-bedroom condo just off of Madison Park – was more impressive than the six other properties she had already shown the Jennings earlier in the day. After all, the entire purpose of this day’s viewing tour was to lead them to this apartment. Today was what Katie called a We Can Do It tour. Like many of her clients, the Jennings had leaped into the fluctuating New York City real estate market with unformed and unrealistic expectations. ‘We don’t really know what neighborhood we want to be in: downtown ideally, but the Upper West Side’s fine, too, or even the Upper East.’ Already, that first sentence from Laura had been a giveaway. To a person who considers downtown her ‘ideal’, the Upper East Side is definitely not fine. Either Laura didn’t know Manhattan – unlikely, given she’d been renting in Chelsea for six years – or she just wasn’t being honest about her preferences. And then there was the budget. ‘We want to stay under 700. We’d love to get a two-bedroom, but know we may have to get by with a one-bedroom-plus to start.’ It was a so-called compromise that Katie heard all the time. The reality, though, was that a true ‘one-bedroom-plus’ – a one-bedroom with a separate space for an office or a crib – was the same square footage (and price) as a small two-bedroom. And neither could be had for anywhere near seven hundred thousand dollars, no matter what people heard about so-called bargains in the down market. If Katie believed the Jennings’ budget cap to be real, she would not have wasted her time on a We Can Do It tour. She instead would have arranged a Come to Jesus tour. In a Come to Jesus tour, Katie would drag a couple like the Jennings to six nice (and, ideally, overpriced) two-bedroom apartments. When the clients finally realized they could not afford apartments of that size, she would lead them to a nice, reasonably priced one-bedroom. It would be time for the clients to Come to Jesus: either get into the market with a small place or rent for the rest of their lives. But the Jennings didn’t need a Come to Jesus tour. They needed the We Can Do It tour, designed not to persuade the clients of what they could not afford, but instead to convince them of what they could afford. Katie knew from the Jennings’ mortgage application that quiet, petite Don pulled in a quarter mil a year as a ‘director of credit risk policy’, whatever that was. Since shacking up with Laura, he was living month to month, but in the decade before he’d met her, he’d managed to save an entire year’s salary. Laura was a jewelry designer who sold her wares at open fairs and to a few small boutiques. Lucky, lucky Laura – whom Katie tried not to resent – had never made more than twenty thousand in any individual year from her craft, but had her father – and now, Don – to fall back on. The Jennings could afford more than they knew. They just had to put away their existing notions of a dollar and to start thinking, We can do it. Katie knew that this generously sized one-bedroom would be a good candidate for convincing the Jennings to ‘stretch’, as she liked to say, but the apartment was even more impressive than she had imagined. The seller had followed all of the rules: clean surfaces, no unnecessary clutter, even the welcoming fragrance of a warm pan of brownies, still cooling on the stovetop. And absolutely no photographs; the apartment should feel like it already belongs to the potential buyers. ‘Now this one’s one-point-one-two-five,’ Katie said, as if the extra four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars was chump change, ‘but my guess is that there’s some softness there.’ Don winced at the number, but his wife did not. ‘Wow, Don, look at this kitchen. We could actually cook if we had this kind of kitchen. Think of the money we’d save in the long run.’ And then Katie knew she had an ally. Crossing the million-dollar threshold would be a leap for Don, but now Katie could see that Laura had been there all along. She felt a twinge of animosity toward the woman for so willingly spending her husband’s hard-earned money, but then reminded herself that she needed the commission. Given Katie’s standing in the hierarchy of her agency, it wasn’t often she had a shot at selling above the million-dollar mark. ‘Feel free to open the cabinets,’ Katie urged. ‘They’re Italian. High-gloss lacquer, top of the line.’ Katie checked her BlackBerry while the Jennings made their way through the apartment. She preferred to give buyers privacy so they could imagine life in their new apartment, without the watchful eye of a broker, but last year a couple posing as buyers made off with a hundred thousand dollars of jewelry and collectibles at various open houses across Manhattan. Now Katie kept one eye on her clients, even while she read her e-mail. She could have used some good news. Instead, the incoming messages brought her more headaches with no corresponding revenue. The purchaser of a Tribeca studio under contract was bickering over a hundred-dollar difference in the negotiations over a built-in wall unit. Katie used her thumbs to type her most comforting words, even as she rolled her eyes in frustration. Another e-mail delivered far worse news on the business front: a client who had been on the fence about making an offer for a West Village one-bedroom had climbed down on the wrong side. That he delivered the news to her electronically was not a good sign. On the phone, she had a chance of persuading him otherwise, or at least lining up the next showings. A terse e-mail like this one told her that the guy had written off not only this particular apartment, but his commitment to purchasing anything at all. The message she received from Marj Mason, a caretaker at Glen Forrest Communities, was even more upsetting. Katie had seen the assisted living center’s telephone number pop up on her vibrating BlackBerry as she had stepped into the elevator with the Jennings. As Katie had requested a few months earlier, Marj had followed up with an e-mail. It was easier for her to check written messages than voice mails when she was with clients. Katie’s mother had fallen again. According to Marj, there were no breaks this time – only bruises, and of course even more fear now of walking on her own. There was no way around it: Katie was going to have to increase the intensity of her mother’s care. And then there was the final message: a text message that Katie had noticed first on her BlackBerry, but read last. She felt a knot form in her stomach as she took in the abrupt instructions. As she replaced her BlackBerry in her red Coach purse, she prayed her mother would never find out about that final message, or what Katie would be doing the following night because of it. Chapter Eleven (#ulink_d3e9f67c-5abc-54c1-b6b4-75e632378da9) 3:45 p.m. Rogan was waiting for Ellie at his desk when she emerged from the locker room, freshly showered, hair still damp. ‘We cool with the Lou?’ ‘Icy. Did you get hold of our guy in Narcotics?’ ‘Yep. He wasn’t real happy about sticking around for a five o’clock arrival. I told him we’d do our best.’ Ellie looked at her watch. It was nearing four. ‘Our best will be five o’clock.’ ‘Are you going to bother telling me why?’ ‘We’ll have to work our way through traffic going uptown.’ ‘Uptown? The Fifth Precinct’s in Chinatown.’ ‘We’re making a pit stop. You’ll see.’ Twenty minutes later, Rogan peered through a glass storefront window on Eighty-ninth and Madison and flinched. ‘Is that woman doing what I think she’s doing?’ ‘Um, that would depend on what exactly your imagination might be doing with the input being processed by your visual cortex.’ ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I think if my brain’s doing anything, it’s trying to forget what I just saw. That shit should be illegal.’ ‘It’s called threading,’ Ellie said. They watched as an Indian woman with smooth dark skin and burgundy-stained lips moved her head back and forth, using the grip of her teeth and the movement of her head to maneuver a thread across the face of a young blond woman seated on the other side of the glass window. ‘She’s using a thread to pull that woman’s eyebrows out?’ ‘It’s called threading,’ Ellie repeated. ‘Should be called torture. What the fuck are we doing here?’ ‘You could use a little tidying up around there,’ Ellie said, reaching for his brow line. Rogan swatted her hand away. ‘This is Perfect Arches,’ she said. ‘It’s Thursday, ten after four. You don’t remember?’ ‘If you’ve some personal woman business to take care of, Hatcher, you really didn’t need to drag me along.’ ‘Perfect Arches? Thursday at four p.m.? Kristen Woods?’ ‘Kristen Woods is Sparks’s assistant.’ ‘The timeline, Rogan. When we first tried to track down Woods about the timeline, she was out of the office. She said she’s got a standing appointment every Thursday at four p.m. to have her eyebrows threaded. I asked her –’ Rogan snapped his fingers. ‘You asked her where. Then you went on and on about how perfect her eyebrows were. I was tempted to reach down and check my anatomy to make sure I was still a man, the two of you blathering like that in front of me.’ ‘I was bonding. Like the way you talk up sports to every doorman we ever need information out of ? Pretending you’re a Mets fan? So I pretended to care about eyebrow plucking. Kristen loves me.’ ‘So if Kristen loves you so much, why are we bombarding her at this dungeon of torture?’ ‘If we want to see Kristen without popping into the Sparks building, this is the place to do it. Look, there she is.’ Rogan followed the line of Ellie’s fingertip and spotted a woman with straight strawberry blond hair down to her shoulders, leaning back in a salon chair, another Indian woman working her magic with a string of thread above her. ‘She dyed her hair,’ he observed. ‘Did she?’ ‘Yeah. It didn’t have any red in it before. It was more your color.’ Ellie dropped her gaze. ‘You might want to check that anatomy after all, girlfriend.’ Rogan flexed his bicep and gave it a little kiss. ‘One hundred percent Afro-American Manly Man, sweetheart. Don’t you forget it.’ He tapped her with the back of his hand. ‘Heads up,’ he said, his tone more serious. Inside the salon, Kristen Woods checked her eyebrows in a handheld mirror, nodded her approval, and then walked to the front desk to pay. ‘You ask me, the money should be going the other direction,’ Rogan muttered. Woods nearly ran into them as she exited the salon, and then turned back as a glimmer of recognition crossed her face. ‘Ellie Hatcher, from the NYPD. My partner, J. J. Rogan.’ ‘Yeah, sure, I remember. I hear you and my boss had quite the run-in yesterday in court.’ Ellie was glad to see that the rapport she’d previously developed with Kristen had not been affected. ‘Mr. Sparks shares those sorts of colorful details with you, does he?’ ‘Are you kidding? He doesn’t tell me squat. I heard him yelling about it in his office yesterday. I think I got the gist.’ ‘I’m sure your boss was heartbroken by my brief period of incarceration.’ ‘Uh, yeah, if what you mean is that it only lasted a day. Sorry, you probably aren’t laughing about this yet.’ ‘Would you be? I couldn’t even keep my own underwear with me.’ ‘Eeewww.’ Rogan tapped one heel, his gaze affixed upward. They both took the hint, and Kristen changed the subject. ‘You’re wrong about him, you know.’ ‘Wrong about what?’ Ellie asked. ‘About Sparks. He can be a prick in his own way, but he’s actually a decent person. There’s no way he’d kill anyone.’ Ellie smiled. Everyone was capable of killing someone. It was just a question of whom, and under what circumstances. But the last thing she wanted was to advertise their agenda to Sparks’s personal assistant. ‘Really,’ Ellie assured her, ‘he’s not a suspect. I tried explaining it to the judge. The whole thing got blown out of proportion.’ ‘“What if Sparks did it?” A cartoon showing him behind bars? It’s kind of funny, I guess, but you’re wrong. I swear.’ ‘It was just doodling. Totally unprofessional, but not at all a reflection of where we are in this investigation. Your boss is not a suspect.’ ‘Right. And that’s why you tracked me down here, where Sam wouldn’t know? But you know what? I don’t care. When cops ask questions, I answer. And if Sam asks me point-blank whether you came to me, I’m not going to lie to him either.’ ‘No one’s asking you to lie, Kristen.’ ‘Yeah, okay, but whatever. He’s not going to ask. I’m sure that was your intention in coming here instead of the office. I was just saying, there’s no way he’d hurt Robo, if that happens to be what you’re thinking. So go ahead and ask whatever you want. I’ve got no problems with you guys.’ She was about as straightforward a witness as two detectives could ask for. Loyal to her boss, but not so loyal that she’d want to lie. ‘We’re going back to the very beginning,’ Ellie said. ‘Making sure we didn’t miss anything. We wanted to talk to you again about Mancini reserving the apartment for that night.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘So the way you explained it to us, you keep a calendar for the 212?’ ‘Right. Sam offers the penthouse to various business associates when they come to town. More impressive than a hotel. I keep track of it all so I can make sure the maid service comes and cleans up after guests, changes the linens – that kind of thing. And that requires knowing when people are there and for how long.’ ‘And then Sparks lets employees use the place, too?’ ‘Yeah. Not a lot, but, you know, it’s the occasional little perk. I told you, he’s not the evil shit you think he is. Everyone knows not to take it for granted.’ ‘And who’s everyone?’ Rogan asked. ‘Not corporate employees, but more of just the personal staff. Me, the bodyguards – I mean, protection specialists,’ she said, smiling. ‘I think he even lent it to his contractor once.’ ‘And none of these people has a key, right?’ Ellie was pretending that she needed to hear all of this information again. ‘No one keeps a key. There’s a coded key compartment that hangs from the apartment door. You flip the digits around to match the code. The box pops open, and the apartment key’s inside. One of my responsibilities after someone stays is to reset the code.’ The night of Mancini’s murder, they had found the door unlocked and the key inside on the kitchen counter. Mancini had not locked the door behind him. ‘So when someone wants to use the apartment, they contact you to reserve their spot on the calendar and get the code.’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘Okay, and when did Mancini reserve the apartment for the night of May 27?’ ‘May 27 was the night of – the night he died, right?’ Ellie nodded. ‘He called me that day. I think I told you before it was around two, but I wasn’t sure.’ In fact, Ellie and Rogan had pulled Kristen’s call records from the cellular phone company used by Sparks Industries. Mancini had placed a call to her at 2:32 that afternoon. ‘And it was just for that night?’ Ellie asked. ‘Yeah. It’s always just one night when we’re using it. Like I said, we don’t want to take advantage.’ ‘And did you tell anyone that Mancini would be using the apartment?’ ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Not even a housekeeper to get the place ready?’ ‘Nope. The apartment had been cleaned two weeks earlier. For the CEO of General Electric, I would have had a fresh cleaning. Robo could live with a little dust.’ ‘And where were you after two o’clock?’ ‘Me?’ ‘Like I said, we’re covering all the bases. Sorry,’ Ellie said, offering her best supportive head-tilt. Ellie had no interest in Kristen’s whereabouts, but focusing on the assistant’s schedule gave them a back door to talk about her boss’s timeline. And if Kristen was on the defensive, she might not notice the maneuver. ‘I was in my office taking care of a ton of details for a party Sam was having the following week. Finalizing the bartenders, the catering menu – I swear I wish the man would get married so his wife could take over his social affairs.’ ‘Married?’ Rogan interjected.‘I’m surprised you even mentioned the possibility, given the rumors.’ ‘Which ones?’ Kristen asked. ‘You listen to the local tabloids, and he’s either an irrepressible playboy or the most popular ride at Big Gay Al’s homosexual theme park.’ Ellie coughed. ‘We hadn’t heard it put in quite those terms.’ ‘Well, I have. And the rumors aren’t true. He dates a lot, but mostly to avoid the rumors that come about when a wealthy bachelor is by himself too often. Hasn’t done him much good, though.’ ‘So the party planning,’ Ellie said, pulling Kristen back to the timeline. ‘That was enough to keep you busy the entire afternoon?’ ‘Pretty much. I’m sure I worked on other stuff as well, but I’d have to go back and try to reconstruct it all from my e-mails, and—’ ‘But you were in the office working? You didn’t have to leave, perhaps with Mr. Sparks?’ ‘No,’ Kristen said, apparently not noticing the pointed direction of Ellie’s comment. ‘He was in the field with his architects that whole afternoon, touring the properties under construction. And after that he had to run straight to a fund-raiser for the Conservation Voters. I remember because I knew from his calendar that I had a big chunk of time to get some work done and then get out early for the day.’ ‘Did you speak to Mr. Sparks at any point that afternoon?’ Again, Kristen shook her head. ‘I even teased him the next day that he’d made remarkable progress in his independence. Not a single call, e-mail, or text message.’ Kristen’s recollection was consistent with the information she’d given them nearly four months earlier. And Ellie and Rogan had confirmed it against her phone records: there had been no contact between her and Sparks from the time Mancini booked the apartment to the time of his murder. Ellie thanked Kristen for her time. ‘You want a ride somewhere?’ she offered. ‘No, thanks. Sam’s done with me for the day, so I’m meeting a friend up here.’ As Ellie led the way back to the Crown Vic, she ran through the timeline in her head again. If Sparks had known where Mancini was going to be that night, he had not learned it from Kristen Woods. It would be three more days before Ellie realized her mistake. Chapter Twelve (#ulink_d98c2446-1143-5fbf-a4aa-98734f92bd0f) 5:15 p.m. The Fifth Precinct of the NYPD is located on Elizabeth Street and Canal. Forty years ago, the spot would have been at the dividing line between Little Italy and Chinatown. But when the federal government changed its immigration laws in 1965, allowing more Asian immigrants into the country, the population of Chinatown exploded. Now Mulberry Street, with its tourist-trap restaurants and sidewalk vendors hawking Bada Bing and Fuggedaboutit T-shirts, was the last remaining enclave of what had once been a real Italian neighborhood. And the Fifth Precinct now stood at the epicenter of an ever-expanding Chinatown. Rogan parked the car on Elizabeth, just south of Canal, and began making his way north to the precinct. ‘Hold up,’ Ellie called out as she pulled open a glass door stenciled with gold Chinese lettering. She emerged sixty seconds later with a roasted pork bun wrapped inside a napkin, the first real food she’d seen since shunning the slop masquerading as lunch at the jail. ‘A buck twenty-five,’ Ellie said, popping a piece of the doughy ball of marinated meat into her mouth. ‘You can’t beat Chinatown.’ By the time they turned the corner to reach the sky blue door of the white brick building that housed the Fifth Precinct, Ellie had finished her makeshift lunch. A civilian aide with a round Charlie Brown head sat at the front service desk. Rogan pulled back his jacket to reveal his detective’s badge. ‘Narcotics?’ The aide gestured toward a staircase just beyond the entrance. ‘Next floor up.’ A few years earlier, police assumed that all home invasions were drug-related. Teacher? Priest? Hero landing an airplane in the Hudson? Wouldn’t matter. Home invasion victims were always and automatically labeled as drug dealers. But in recent years, police had seen an increase in both home invasions and the number of tragic cases in which innocent people had found themselves targeted by the most predatory and violent offenders, simply because their address was one digit away from a reputed drug house. On the second floor, Rogan asked a second civilian aide to see Sergeant Frank Boyle. ‘The sergeant had to leave. Are you Detective Rogan?’ Rogan nodded. ‘And Hatcher. I called Boyle a little more than an hour ago. He was expecting us.’ ‘Something came up.’ ‘Like maybe five o’clock?’ Rogan said, glancing at his watch. The aide smiled politely. ‘Perhaps. He said to see Detective Carenza over there.’ He pointed to a refrigerator-sized man standing over a desk toward the back of the squad room. As they walked toward the man who was apparently called Carenza, Ellie noticed that his tanned, veiny biceps were challenging the seams of his fitted black T-shirt. The rest of the ensemble consisted of faded blue jeans, pointed alligator shoes, and a heavy gold chain. ‘Ellie Hatcher,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘Your sergeant left word to see you?’ ‘Tony Carenza.’ The detective gave her a firm handshake and then turned to Rogan to offer the same.‘Then you must be Rogan, because Boyle told me some guy from Homicide was coming.’ ‘You heading out on an undercover?’ Rogan asked, eyeing the wardrobe. Carenza glanced down at his own clothing and shrugged. ‘Nah, man. Just wrapping up some paperwork here, and then I’m audi.’ Rogan was nodding politely when Carenza broke out laughing. ‘Gotcha nervous there, didn’t I? Nah, my stuff might not be quite up to what you got going on here,’ he said, pointing at Rogan’s three-button Canali suit, ‘but this getup’s definitely for the job. The mod’s running some buy-and-busts tonight at some of the clubs.’ In addition to the teams of stop-and-frisk uniform cops that had made New York’s zero-tolerance policing famous, the narcotics division used so-called investigatory modules to run undercover operations. Carenza pulled at the diamond-encrusted dollar sign dangling from his gold chain, most likely a trophy seized during a prior bust. ‘Too much?’ ‘Fierce,’ Ellie said. ‘Yeah, I thought so. So what can I do you for? My sergeant made a point of instructing me to be helpful, so consider me your most helpful helper.’ Rogan scratched his cheek while he spoke. ‘We’re still chasing a case from May – dead body left behind in a home invasion on Kenmare and Lafayette.’ ‘Yeah, I know that case. The 212. Should be called the 646. Last time I checked, no one could get a 212 number anymore. The place belonged to Sam Sparks, right?’ Rogan nodded, and it struck Ellie that Sparks might be better known to the general public than she had realized, even without the assistance of a reality show. ‘We checked with Boyle at the time to see if we might be looking at a case of mistaken identity. He came up with nothing. Now Sparks’s lawyer says he hears otherwise. He claims you’re running an operation on one of Sparks’s neighbors.’ ‘I wouldn’t call it an operation,’ Carenza said, handing Ellie a DD5, the departmental form used to report on ongoing investigations. This one related to Apartment 702 at 212 Lafayette. ‘It’s directly next door,’ she said. Rogan glanced at the sheet of paper over her shoulder. ‘The only other apartment on that floor, as I recall.’ The DD5 contained entries for three events – two in March, one in June. ‘Two neighbors came to our front service desk in March, complaining about a drug dealer who had just moved into one of the luxury condos on the top of the building. You’ve seen that building?’ They both nodded. ‘Okay, so you know the deal. It’s this old building, been there forever. Most of the tenants are rent-stabilized. Also been there forever. Then Sam Sparks buys up the roof space, stacks a few multimillion-dollar apartments on top, and calls the place 212. Two totally different kinds of tenants, now sharing one elevator and one lobby. You get your culture clashes.’ Ellie felt her cell vibrate against her waist but let the call go to voice mail. ‘And where did these two neighbors fit into the clash?’ she asked. ‘The old ladies who eat dinner at four thirty at the corner-diner side. They’d lived a good century and a half between them. And I’m telling you, they were a hoot. Watched Law and Order and CSI reruns all day long on “the cable”, as they called it. They had the lingo down: skels, perps, mary jane, CIs, gun run. I mean, you name it, and they knew it. They were ready to sign up as CIs themselves. But let’s say that as confidential informants go, they weren’t the most reliable profilers when it comes to detecting drug dealing. Dirty old men? Not pushing the garbage all the way down the chute? That, I would trust them on. But they were the kind of sweet innocent citizens who think anyone who’s got friends coming and going at all hours of the night must be up to no good. Let’s call it a generational divide.’ ‘So why do you have a DD5 on the apartment?’ ‘Because the sweet biddies wouldn’t go away. God love ’em, they kept coming in and harping to the front desk with all their cop slang, cracking up everyone in the house but also being a major pain in the ass. So eventually the poor sacks in the community policing unit got dragged in to calm them down. You know what those guys are all about – it’s appeasement. So finally they put the old birds to work on a citizen-driven search warrant.’ ‘How come Boyle didn’t tell us about this when we called you guys at the end of May?’ ‘Because half the time when we start a citizen-driven warrant, the oh-so-concerned citizens get lazy and let it drop. We don’t bother logging anything onto a DD5 until they come back with all their paperwork. In this case, that didn’t happen until June.’ ‘What exactly is a citizen-driven warrant?’ Rogan asked. ‘No time in Narcotics, huh?’ He said it as if no qualified cop could make it into Homicide without pulling duty in the drug squad. Given that Ellie made it to her current position after only five years in uniform and one as a detective in general crimes, she was thankful the question hadn’t been aimed at her. ‘Major Case Squad, then SVU,’ Rogan said. His confident tone made clear that the Special Victims Unit made Narcotics look like crossing guard duty. ‘Okay, so a citizen-driven warrant is this thing we came up with, but it’s really a community policing tool. You know, after nine-eleven, we’ve got these ads all up and down MTA, telling people, “If you see something, say something.” ’ ‘But we’re not always talking about the next Zacarias Moussaoui.’ ‘No, knock on wood, not in most cases. Instead, we get these nosy neighbors convinced that someone’s up to something. So the citizen-driven warrant puts them to work. They write down every suspicious thing they see. They turn in the pages to us. If it adds up to probable cause, we ask for a warrant. If not –’ ‘You assure them you did everything you could, and then tell ’em to pound sand.’ ‘Pretty much. So that’s what we’ve got here on the DD5. The two ladies walk in to the help desk in March. A couple weeks later, after a few more streetwise Laurel and Hardy routines downstairs, they hook up with the community policing liaison, who tells them about the citizen-driven warrants. We take a look at it after a couple months, and there’s nothing there.’ ‘You’re sure?’ Ellie asked. ‘No doubt. You work drugs a little while, and you get super-honed spidey senses. Homeboy’s getting his party on like any other single man with that kind of money in Manhattan. And so we could say we did everything we could, my partner and I even did a little knock and talk with the guy. That’s the entry in June there. Truth be told, I just wanted to score a peek at the place.’ ‘And?’ Rogan nudged. ‘The condo was sweet. Marble floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows–’ ‘The resident. Drugs? Dealing?’ ‘Would never happen. Dude’s Eurotrash, buying up Manhattan real estate while the dollar’s in the toilet. Goes clubbing every night. Picks up bridge-and-tunnel skanks looking for a short-term sugar daddy, a place to party for the night. Had no problem letting me search. The place was clean but for some personal-use marijuana in the nightstand. He didn’t seem fazed that I found it, and I really didn’t want to process him for it, so he flushed it. No hard stuff. No paraphernalia. No packaging materials. No cash or books.’ ‘No dealing.’ ‘No dealing.’ ‘You got a cell number in case we need you to nail this down for court?’ Ellie asked. ‘Sparks’s lawyer made it sound like Pablo Escobar lived next door.’ She jotted down the number in her notebook, and they began to make their way out of the squad room. Guerrero had been blowing smoke with his claims of a drug operation going down across the hall at the 212, but she still wondered how the lawyer had even known about it. Then she realized the likely source. She turned toward Carenza. ‘Hey, you don’t happen to know Nick Dillon, do you?’ ‘Sure. My brother’s on the job, too. He and Dillon were in the Major Case Squad before Dillon sold out to the man. We play cards sometimes. Takes my money big-time.’ ‘Any chance you mentioned this whole citizen-driven warrant thing to him?’ ‘Yeah. He used to work Narcotics, too, you know? I thought he’d get a kick out of his boss’s neighbors practicing their slang over mah-jongg. Hey, that didn’t cause any problems for you, did it? I mean, there was nothing to it, so –’ Rogan waved him off. ‘Don’t sweat it, man.’ Rogan caught Ellie’s eye on their way out of the precinct. ‘The man’s got ears, right? That guy makes a friend, he keeps a friend.’ ‘Well, being his pal didn’t save me from a jail cell. Maybe next time you can be the one who does our time.’ ‘Nah,’ he said, holding open the precinct door for her to exit. ‘I’m way too pretty for central holding on some chippy contempt rap. Someone like me goes down, it’s got to be major. I would need some serious federal corrections facility – golf course, croquet…’ ‘Rogan, you were raised in Brooklyn. Do you even know what croquet is?’ ‘I know it involves a round thing called a ball, which means it’s yet another sport a brother could dominate if we only gave it a shot.’ ‘When you’re done, you think you might get around to letting me in?’ Ellie tugged on the Crown Vic’s locked passenger handle to make her point. Inside the car, she flipped open her phone and saw a new voice mail from Max Donovan. Opting to wait for some privacy, she clipped the cell back to her waist. The drive from Chinatown was slowed by end-of-day traffic. Even with the assistance of wigwag lights, they didn’t pull up in front of the Thirteenth Precinct until nearly six o’clock. Ellie was about to log onto her computer when she caught sight of Max Donovan through the open slats of the blinds that covered Lieutenant Robin Tucker’s office. Tucker stood, walked to her office door, and poked her head into the squad room. ‘Good timing, you two. A quick word?’ Rogan shot Ellie a look that made her wish she’d checked Max’s message in the car. ‘This can’t be good.’ Chapter Thirteen (#ulink_fc2a96dc-c9b3-5ec5-8397-817c05d753ab) 6:00 p.m. ‘ADA Donovan has an update for us on the Sparks case.’ Robin Tucker leaned back in her chair and smiled in Ellie’s direction. ‘We should thank him for the special attention he’s shown by coming here in person to deliver the news.’ Ellie knew it was a dig from her lieutenant about her personal relationship with an assistant district attorney – a relationship that was undoubtedly behind Max’s decision to make the trip from the courthouse. ‘Apparently yesterday wasn’t a big enough win for Sparks. I got papers delivered to my office this morning from Ramon Guerrero.’ ‘What more could they possibly want? Our motion for access to Sparks’s files went down in flames. I got smacked with a contempt charge.’ ‘They fucking slaughtered us,’ Rogan said. ‘Well, Guerrero wants another pound of flesh. His motion demands access to all evidence gathered by the NYPD in relation to the death of one Robert Mancini.’ ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Ellie said. Rogan chimed in. ‘Tell them to take their motion and stick it up –’ Robin Tucker made a T sign with her hands. ‘Will you two let the man speak? He’s trying to tell you where things stand.’ ‘Well, of course the motion’s frivolous,’ Donovan said. ‘The mere fact that Sparks has a connection is insufficient to give him any claim to access to the investigation. And they can’t rely on public records laws because it’s obviously an ongoing investigation.’ ‘So is this just a big-firm lawyer trying to run up his bill?’ Rogan asked. Max ran a hand through his already tousled brown hair. ‘No, or at least, that’s not the only reason. Guerrero’s good. He knows he’s got a judge who wants to please him.’ ‘But supposedly Bandon’s solid,’ Rogan said. Judges earned reputations with law enforcement. Bandon was known as a straight shooter – tough on crime, but fair to both sides. Max nodded. ‘That he is, but for a reason. Bandon’s not the kind of guy whose career ends with the state trial court. He was a major player in the Justice Department in the nineties, then got a sweet special counsel hookup at a major law firm. He’s only pulling duty as a local judge to perfect his resum? for the federal bench, and rumor is, his name’s finally coming up. No more elections. Better cases. Higher prestige. It’s basically every lawyer’s dream gig. So, yeah, for three years, he’s been as solid as solid comes. But for our purposes, on this case, at this particular time, he might be a little too solid. Someone like Sparks’s got the ear of the machine that pulls those political appointment strings.’ ‘So he’s just going to turn over our entire case to Sparks? That’s blatantly illegal.’ Max shook his head. ‘No. Bandon knows there’s no merit to Guerrero’s motion. In fact, his clerk called me this morning right after the papers were served and basically said the whole thing is bullshit. But then something must’ve changed his mind, because Bandon’s clerk called back again about’ – he looked at his watch –‘a little under an hour ago.’ Rogan threw Ellie a worried look as she was already picturing a loose-lipped Kristen Woods, with freshly arched brows, dishing to her boss about this afternoon’s surprise fishing expedition. ‘So what exactly are we looking at?’ she asked. Max frowned. ‘Bandon wants to throw Guerrero a bone. I figure he’s trying to send a message to Sparks that he did all he could.’ ‘Which is?’ Rogan asked. ‘Bandon wants a briefing, under oath, about where things stand. And then from there he wants updates on the case.’ Ellie and Rogan were only two people, but from the cacophony in Tucker’s office, they could have been the entire studio audience of The Jerry Springer Show. ‘Can he do that?’ Rogan finally demanded. ‘Not typically,’ Max said. ‘There’s a separation of powers issue. We’re the executive. He’s the judiciary. He has no claim to a general right to access information that we possess in an investigation.’ ‘Okay, so once again, tell them where they can stick that motion.’ Max looked at Ellie, and she knew what was coming. ‘He says this isn’t a typical case. He says there’s at least a colorable claim that the NYPD is harassing Sam Sparks –’ Rogan was already shaking his head, but Ellie held up a hand, wanting to hear the rest of the explanation. ‘Bandon says it’s a colorable claim, that’s all. And that in light of the jurisdiction he has over the matter given Guerrero’s demand for discovery, he’s ordering this process as temporary relief. It’s basically a middle ground. The way he explained it to me, he’s essentially protecting us – you, really, the police’ – he looked again at Ellie –‘from a harassment suit by intervening.’ ‘Tell him to bring it on,’ Rogan said. ‘He’s gotten kid gloves compared to anyone else who’d be in his position. Bring it the fuck on. Let him sue.’ Rogan looked to his partner for validation, but Ellie just stared at the speckled earth-tone linoleum of Tucker’s office floor. If Max was here, instead of the courthouse, it was because he had already tried to fight on her behalf. ‘I already ran it up the chain,’ he said, confirming her suspicions. ‘Knight thinks it’s best if we play along.’ Knight was the chief prosecutor of the trial unit at the district attorney’s office and was also Max’s boss. ‘It’s just a matter of meeting with Bandon in chambers – in camera – no Sparks, no Guerrero, not even a court reporter – and then I’ll informally notify him of any further material developments. Like I said, it’s really just for show. Bandon comes out looking good to Sparks. Nothing on the record shows he’s doing some rich ass a favor –’ ‘And we’re going to play along,’ Rogan said. He didn’t bother to hide the sarcasm. Ellie finally spoke up. ‘Donovan’s right. Bandon’s probably helping us out.’ Robin Tucker looked at Ellie with raised eyebrows. It was a look of surprised approval. ‘And Rogan should be the one to do the in camera session with Judge Bandon.’ ‘What? So I can serve some time, too?’ ‘So I won’t be an issue. So Bandon will see we’ve dealt with Sparks on the up-and-up.’ ‘That’s a good idea,’ Max said quietly. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Okay, so we’re all done here?’ Tucker said. ‘Happy campers all around?’ No one looked happy, but no one was protesting. ‘That was easier than I thought. Now get out of here. I’ve got a kid waiting at home for dinner.’ Rogan didn’t bother waiting until they were back to their desks before reconstructing the events that must have led to Judge Bandon’s phone call to Max Donovan that afternoon. ‘Your girl Kristen Woods gave us up,’ he said once they had both crossed the threshold of Tucker’s office. ‘I assumed the same thing.’ ‘So much for the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits,’ he said. ‘Well, Woods is more of a miniskirt and stiletto heels type anyway.’ Ellie tried to muster a smile as she lowered herself into her worn vinyl-upholstered desk chair. ‘Given the timing, she must’ve called Sparks the second we left her on the street.’ ‘And then Sparks makes a call to Bandon.’ ‘Or, more likely, he calls his lawyer, and then Guerrero calls Bandon. That way it at least looks like an actual legal process.’ ‘Instead of the bullshit rich-boys club that it is.’ Ellie felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to find Max Donovan smiling down at her. ‘I’m gonna get my gear from the locker room,’ Rogan said. ‘You okay?’ Max asked once Rogan was out of earshot. ‘Yeah, I’m good.’ ‘I know this has to be hard on you.’ ‘Really, it’s fine. I’m actually grateful that Rogan will be the one to deal with Bandon this time. I probably need some distance.’ ‘I’ve got another couple hours of work at the courthouse, but meet at my place when I’m done?’ ‘I’m sorry, Max. I’m really tired. Last night wasn’t exactly the Ritz-Carlton, you know?’ ‘That’s fine. Why don’t you go home and get some rest, and I’ll come to you.’ ‘I don’t think I’ll be very good company.’ ‘That’s all right. I’m used to doing all the talking while I watch you chew,’ he said, smiling. Ellie knew she should be grateful for his response. She should be thankful that he wanted to support her, to comfort her, to watch her sleep the way she’d sometimes catch him in the morning. And she wanted to accept his offer. She wanted to be the kind of woman whose first instinct was to run to a man who cared about her when she was under pressure. But one of the things she loved about Max was that he seemed to understand her, even when she had trouble understanding herself. And he was comfortable and confident and took everything in stride. Unlike other men she’d dated, she never had to worry about Max making it all about him. It was all the more reason to wish she could give him what he wanted. ‘I’m sorry. Tomorrow, okay? I promise. Tonight I just need to kick the blankets, squish the pillows, drool onto the sheets, and snore like an old fat man. And I really don’t want you to see me like that.’ ‘Might kill the magic.’ ‘Exactly.’ She held his gaze and brushed his forearm. ‘Tomorrow.’ ‘Tomorrow.’ ‘I’m holding you to it.’ ‘You better.’ ‘Well, get some rest, all right? You’ve earned it.’ Outside on Twenty-first Street, to the west, Ellie spotted a familiar figure leaning against the white stone of the building, smoking a cigarette. Jess. She smiled at her older brother as she imagined all of the one-liners he must have come up with at her expense since she’d called him the night before from jail. ‘Hey, you.’ She caught a whiff of smoke and wondered when she’d stop missing it. He removed an unopened pack of Marlboros from his faded jean jacket and handed them to her. ‘I quit, remember?’ She had, for the most part. ‘I hear they’re currency where you’re from.’ ‘Funny.’ ‘I’m serious. Anything you want. Soap. Candy. Porn. A shiv. Reefer. The white pony. These bad boys can get you anything on the inside.’ He shook the cigarettes for emphasis. ‘Is that all you got?’ she asked dryly. ‘Of course not. I figured I’d go with the prop comedy first. Let the rest of my lines trickle out over the next few days. Weeks. Months, if necessary.’ ‘Oh, good. Something to look forward to.’ ‘Are you up for a drink, or are you too jacked up on bootleg hootch from your time in the joint?’ ‘Oh, I think I can stay awake long enough for a drink.’ ‘You know I only treat at one place.’ ‘You know the torment that awaits me in there?’ The bar in question was Plug Uglies, a classic old watering hole around the corner on Third Avenue. Thanks to its proximity to the precinct and an absurdly cheap happy hour, one could always count on finding a row of cops drinking there at this time of day. ‘C’mon. Cheap drinks. A little darts. Some shuffleboard. You’ve got to take your lumps from the house sometime, or it’s only going to fester.’ ‘The house. Listen to you with the cop talk.’ ‘Jesus, I’ve been spending too much time with you.’ Ellie and Jess had been raised in the same home, with the same intense homicide detective as a father, but had dealt with their police-dominated environment in opposite ways. Jess had rebelled, shunning any kind of hierarchy or ordered regime that might even begin to resemble a law enforcement culture. Ellie, on the other hand, had breathed it all in and had allowed it to define her. She pulled the wrapper from the Marlboros. Just one drag. She’d earned it. Chapter Fourteen (#ulink_27b60235-9fb8-5035-b0fb-9b852335bbb1) 6:15 p.m. Inside the tiny efficiency studio that Glen Forrest Communities called her mother’s ‘apartment’, Katie Battle filled a green-tinted glass with water from the sink and placed it on the small rosewood table that doubled as both nightstand and end table between the empty bed and the chair that her mother currently occupied. Once she received the e-mail about her mother’s latest fall, she’d wrapped up the tour with the Jenning couple and made it to the assisted living center as quickly as she could. Katie sat on the bed and watched as her mother slowly raised the glass to her lips with a quivering hand. ‘Don’t you…even…think…about grabbing…one of those…ridiculous children’s toys…on top of my icebox.’ Katie had purchased a box of plastic straws for her mother four months earlier, but they still sat unopened on top of the refrigerator. ‘Those are for children,’ her mother had said. ‘I start using one of those, and the next thing I know, you’ll be trying to feed me with a miniature spoon passed off as an airplane.’ Katie noticed that her mother placed her right hand on her chest during the three-second gaps between words. She knew that the falter in her mother’s usually strong voice was the byproduct of doctors tinkering with her heart medication again. They’d assured Katie that the occasional skipped beat wasn’t itself a danger, but she could tell that the irregularities in something we all took for granted – our beating hearts – scared her mother, causing the pauses in her speech. None of this was easy for Katie’s mother. Phyllis Battle had always been a woman who had known what she wanted. When her first daughter, Barbara, had been killed in a car accident in 1974, she had known – and insisted to her husband – that they would adopt another, even though they had each already celebrated their fiftieth birthdays. And she had known – and insisted to her husband – that they would name the girl Katie, after the confident and independent woman who leaves Robert Redford behind in The Way We Were. And when her husband passed away ten years ago, leaving behind debts he had never mentioned to his wife, Phyllis had known – and insisted to her daughter, Katie – that she would continue to live in the family home alone. The highest hurdle Katie had ever faced had come a year ago when she told her mother she needed to move. For the first time, someone for once was insisting on something to Phyllis. Katie had eventually won that initial battle between the Battle women, but that didn’t mean her mother was going to forfeit what might remain of the war. No plastic drinking straws. No arts and crafts in the common room with the women whom her mother called the ‘pathetic old biddies’. None of the loose, maintenance-free cotton housedresses that were practically a uniform at Glen Forrest. And definitely no wheelchairs. ‘Mom, I know you don’t want to hear this, but another fall could be really bad.’ ‘I can…take care…of myself.’ ‘I know. But you’d find it’s a lot easier if you’d take advantage of some of the things they have here to help you, like a chair, Mom.’ Katie leaned forward and rested her hand gently on top of her mother’s. At eighty-two years old, her mother had maintained her full cognition and spirit, but her hand had never felt so thin and frail, her blue veins bulging beneath the loose and wrinkled skin. ‘You mean…a wheelchair. I’m not…an invalid.’ ‘We could ask for a really crappy one if that would make you feel better. None of this high-speed electric power stuff. You’d wheel yourself. Think of the upper-body workout you’d get. I can even request a bum wheel so it would be like a bad shopping cart if you want.’ Katie was happy to see her mother smiling, but then the smile turned into a laugh and her mother wheezed and then coughed. Her hand moved reflexively to her chest again. ‘Shhh,’ Katie said soothingly. Her heart. The stroke. The falls. Keeping track of her mother’s ailments required Mensa-caliber mental juggling. The second her mother caught her breath, she was back on message. ‘No wheel…chairs.’ ‘You scare me, Mom. I know you like to think it’s just a fall. But this isn’t something you can play around with. Falls in the elderly –’ Her mother shot her a look of darts. ‘Falls now can be fatal. Do you know how stupid it would be to survive everything you’ve survived, just to go out by falling down? Phyllis Battle is way too tough – and much too smart – to allow that.’ Her mother set her jaw, but she at least wasn’t arguing anymore. ‘I’ve asked Marj to bring a chair up tonight.’ Now her mom shook her head, but still no verbal resistance. ‘Just for you to experiment with. She’ll work with you out in the hallway when the others are listening to a music group that’s coming in tonight.’ ‘Horrible, horrible…They call themselves singers. Like someone threw…a cat…in a washing machine.’ ‘OK, so when all the old biddies are down there clapping along with the terrible music, you be nice to Marj. I’ll check in with her tomorrow about how it went, and we can go from there.’ Still, her mother said nothing. Progress. Katie rose from the bed, picked up her purse from the floor, and leaned over to place a kiss on the top of her mother’s head. ‘Good night, Mom.’ Katie had already opened the apartment door when she heard her mother’s quiet voice behind her. ‘I’m…sorry, Katie. For…falling. For…being old.’ ‘Don’t you ever apologize. Just be nice to Marj tonight. I want you around for a long, long time.’ On her walk to the F train, Katie retrieved her BlackBerry from the depths of her oversize black leather satchel. Pulling up a phone number, she hit the dial button, only to hang up after one ring. She wanted someone to take her place tomorrow night. With Mom’s latest fall, the last thing she wanted to deal with was tomorrow night. Ironically, though, it was her mother’s situation that required her to handle this appointment herself. It was only a few hours. She’d get through it, just like she always did. Chapter Fifteen (#ulink_98c2c1a2-55d0-5f77-91a8-6ffcea720291) 6:45 p.m. If there was a bar in the East Twenties that epitomized the drinking side of the law enforcement culture, it was Plug Uglies. Where glass-walled martini bars soaked in ubiquitous lounge music had begun to dominate even Murray Hill, Plug Uglies was still a dark wood pub adorned with black-and-white photographs of old New York, dartboards, and a well-stocked jukebox. The comments began the moment Ellie opened the door. ‘Look alive, Officers. We’ve got a hardened ex-con in our midst.’ ‘Call the probation department. Make sure she’s checked in.’ More jokes about the need for a shower, despite the fact that she’d cleaned up hours earlier. Ellie took a mock bow in recognition of the attention, and someone playing shuffleboard in the back broke out in a round of ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. And then it was over. ‘See, not so bad,’ Jess said, ordering a Johnnie Walker Black for her and a Jack Daniel’s for himself. Ellie took a seat on the bar stool next to his. ‘So how was life without me last night?’ After briefly shacking up with a self-described exotic dancer for two months last summer, Jess was back on Ellie’s living room sofa again, where he always seemed to spend the largest bulk of his residency. ‘Quiet.’ ‘It’s not the first time you’ve been trusted at home alone without a watcher.’ Ellie and Max were taking things slow. Casual. Dating. No relationship talk yet. But she did spend the night with him about twice a week, enough to justify a second toothbrush at his place. ‘Quieter than that,’ Jess said. ‘I was worried about you.’ ‘I think you got our roles switched. I’m the worrier. You’re the worri-ee.’ She smiled, picturing her usually stress-free brother alone in her apartment fretting over her. ‘Oh, shit,’ she said, her momentary inner calm destroyed. ‘Did Mom call? I totally spaced.’ With rare exceptions, Ellie called her mother in Wichita every single night. The routine dated back to her first days in New York, where she’d followed Jess more than ten years ago to assuage her mother’s concerns about her only son, and most reckless child, living on his own in a city where a person like Jess could find more than his fair share of trouble. Ellie would call her mother each night because she knew her mother would sleep better once she heard her two children in the big city were safe. Then slowly what had begun as a sweet habit had become a requirement – minimal validation to lonely, widowed Roberta that the children who’d abandoned her at least missed her from afar. And now Ellie had forgotten to call. She knew from experience she would pay for it the next time they spoke. ‘You didn’t tell her where I was, did you?’ ‘Are you kidding? I didn’t pick up the phone.’ ‘Jess.’ ‘Sorry, sis. That drama’s your department.’ ‘I assume she left an epic message?’ Jess nodded, knocking back a toss of bourbon. ‘Don’t tell me. She did her whole passive-aggressive, I-know-you’ve-got-more-important-things-to-do speech.’ ‘Something like that. I believe she may have said something about spending all your time with a man she still knows nothing about and has never met.’ ‘Jesus. I never should have mentioned Max to her.’ ‘Uh, duh? Don’t ask, don’t tell, is my motto. Tie me to a water board at Gitmo. Call out the dogs. I say notzing,’ he said in his best Sergeant Schultz impersonation from the old television show, Hogan’s Heroes. ‘You know the only reason you get away with that is because I tell Mom what’s going on with you.’ ‘No, you tell her what she wants to hear about what’s going on with me. The dude featured in the fictional tales of those phone calls is a complete and utter tool.’ Ellie did have a tendency to convey to their mother a brighter version of her and Jess’s lives. In the fairy-tale world that Ellie had created for her mother’s benefit, Ellie was a well-adjusted woman who just happened to be a cop, who had girlfriends, dates, and hobbies. She was nothing like the father, and her mother’s husband, who had given everything to the job. And in these stories Jess’s band, Dog Park, actually got paid to play standing-room-only gigs, and a lucrative record contract was waiting for them around the next corner. ‘You should have picked up, Jess. Just to make her feel better.’ ‘And you should stop coddling her, and allowing her to hold you hostage with your daily calls. But that’s not up to me.’ Instead of responding, Ellie took another sip of her drink. ‘So,’ Jess said, filling the silence, ‘I may have met the stupidest woman on the planet yesterday.’ ‘Hmm, I don’t know. The competition in that arena can be pretty stiff.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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