212 eh-3

by Alafair Burke

  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 to the police officers sullying his spotless pied-à-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, Detective Hatcher?” 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

  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 soul patch 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

  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 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 ma
de 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.”