212 eh-3

by Alafair Burke

  “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

  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

  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.”