212 eh-3

by Alafair Burke

  “You’re going a little too fast for me here, Courtney. Take a deep breath, slow down, and tell me what you know about Keith.”

  “Megan met him at a club first semester of freshman year. He’s like a DJ or something. They were crazy about each other right away, but then Keith took it way too seriously. It’s like he could never get enough attention from her. He was jealous—not of other guys, because Megan wasn’t like that—but of her life. Her classes. Her reading. Me, when we had the time for each other.”

  “When did they break up?”

  “About three months ago. But they were on and off for a good four months before that. I’d say the tipping point was when Heather moved in—the roommate?”

  Ellie nodded to confirm she knew to whom Courtney was referring.

  “Last spring Megan’s parents told her she needed to find a roommate to share the costs of the apartment. Keith offered to move in and share the rent. It was a ridiculous suggestion for all kinds of reasons. She’d never get her work done if he was around. Not to mention that there’s no way he could afford the rent her parents were looking for. Not to mention the fact that she was only twenty years old, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Plenty of reasons not to shack up.”

  “Right. But instead of fighting over it all, Megan took the easy route and told him that her parents would never allow it. And then he asked whether she had even talked to her parents about it. She made the mistake of telling him the truth.”

  “She never approached them?”

  “Of course not,” Courtney said. “It was an absurd idea, but not to Keith. I guess after she found Heather and rented the extra room to her, Keith treated every interaction with Heather—or even remotely related to her—as an excuse to remind Megan that she had rejected him. You don’t even know that girl. Now we never have any privacy. We could have kept that as an extra room. You never took me seriously. And on that last one, Megan finally had to admit he was right. For her, for her life, the thought of living together was crazy. But for Keith, it had meant everything.”

  “And that’s what ended it.”

  “Yep. It was hard on her, but he came with too much drama, you know? He was always trying to pull her away from school. It would be just like him to use a message board aimed at college students to get to her.”

  “But when Megan told you about the postings, you didn’t think Keith might be responsible?”

  “It never even dawned on me. It should have, though, right? He wanted to isolate her. He knew her routine. Maybe if she was too afraid to live her life, she’d go back to him. It’s so obvious.”

  Ellie was careful not to overvalue Courtney’s instincts. She had seen witnesses respond this way before. Once they believed police had homed in on a suspect, witnesses changed their perceptions so that suddenly the suspect’s name at the top of the list seemed inevitable.

  “All I’ve got on Keith right now is a first name and pierced lower lip,” Ellie said. “You got a last name for us?”

  Courtney pressed her eyes closed. “Shit. This is impossible, right? Megan had to have told me his last name at some point. I just don’t remember. It was always ‘Keith this, Keith that.’ I don’t know. Something Spanish, I think. He said he was half Dominican. Maybe…Guzaro, or Guittierez. For some reason, I think it began with a G.”

  “What about a phone number? Address?” They had already checked Megan’s cell phone for a Keith, but she must have erased his number after the breakup.

  Courtney shook her head. “He always went to her place. He still lives with his mother. Wait.” She hopped up from the sofa, made her way to a dining room table covered with books and notebooks, and flipped open a laptop. “I have a picture.”

  Ellie rose from the couch and looked over Courtney’s shoulder while she clicked through a library of photos. Girls at a bowling alley. Another set on a beach somewhere with tall fruity drinks. On the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Courtney sniffled. “Okay, here he is.”

  Ellie leaned forward to get a better look. Megan was on the left side of the screen, her long blond hair curled softly around her shoulders, a broad smile across her face. The young man with his arm around her shoulder mugged for the camera, replicating a model’s exaggerated pout. He had creamy light brown skin and dark brown wavy hair. She could see how his racial identity might appear ambiguous. Nice smile. Round cheeks. He would have been a good-looking kid without the two platinum hoops dangling from either side of his lower lip like metal fangs.

  “Any others?” Ellie asked.

  Courtney shook her head. “No, I snapped this during one of the few times he tagged along. I doubt you’ll find any pictures of him at Megan’s either. She deleted them all to prove that the breakup was for good. She still wore the necklace he gave her, though. I noticed that.”

  “Can you e-mail the picture to me?” Ellie asked. She rattled off her personal Gmail address while Courtney typed, then watched as Courtney hit the send key on a message she had labeled “Predator.”

  “We should have gone to the same school,” Courtney said, thinking aloud. “The original plan was for both of us to go to Columbia, but she didn’t get in. I should have gone to NYU with her. Maybe then—”

  “Courtney, you don’t know me from a hole in the ground, but trust me, I speak from experience: Don’t start down that road of maybes. You’ll create the kind of demons that can destroy you for years.”

  When Courtney closed the door behind her, Ellie pictured the girl back at the dining room table, clicking again through the files of old photographs, and knew her advice was useless.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  4:50 P.M.

  Ellie had parallel-parked on Twenty-first Street and was about to open the car door when she spotted Lieutenant Robin Tucker in her rearview mirror. She decided to avoid an encounter and stayed put inside the car, watching as her lieutenant let the precinct door swing closed behind her. Tucker paused just outside the precinct, opened a slim gold metallic handbag, and swept some gloss across her lips. She reached into the same bag again and then clipped her hair into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. As she walked in Ellie’s direction, Tucker’s tan trench blew open, revealing a dark green wrap dress that played up her pale skin. From the looks of things, Tucker had spruced herself up for something.

  Ellie slumped into her seat and continued to watch as Tucker smiled and gave a friendly wave to someone on the other side of the street. As she turned to cross Twenty-first, Ellie lost sight of her in the rearview mirror.

  She adjusted the right side-view mirror to get a better look. Browsing the cars parked on the north side of the street, she speculated about which one was her lieutenant’s intended destination.

  Then her eyes fell on a black Infiniti sedan.

  “No fucking way,” she said to no one in particular. She adjusted the side-view mirror again to confirm what she had seen. Sure enough, she recognized the Infiniti’s driver.

  Robin Tucker had spruced herself up for none other than Nick Dillon, the head of corporate security for Sparks Industries.

  Ellie found Rogan hunched over a spread of documents across his desktop. She recognized the pages as call logs, most of them from AT&T wireless, and a few from Verizon.

  “You got the call dumps already?”

  Rogan nodded, but didn’t look up from his papers. “Cell phone and landline. A lot more activity on the cell, of course.”

  Phone companies could produce itemized lists of call activity for cell phones, but for landlines they could provide information only about outbound long-distance calls. Fortunately for this case, young people tended to use their cell phones for most of their calls.

  “You happen to see Tucker walk out of here?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “She was all dressed up.”

  Silence.

  “And guess who was waiting for her outside?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Nick Dillon. Un-freakin’-believ
able.”

  Silence.

  “Find any Keiths yet on those call lists?”

  “Nope,” Rogan said.

  “Anything else in there to get excited about?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any chance I can get a few more words, just so I can pretend you’re listening to me?”

  “Sorry,” Rogan said, finally leaning back in his chair and turning his attention to her. “Maybe I’m in a piss-poor mood after all.”

  “Gee, you think? If the tables were turned, you’d be on your fifth PMS joke by now.”

  “All right, so you were saying about the Lou?”

  “She just left the building looking a hell of a lot better than I’ve ever seen her around here, and jumped into a car driven by Nick Dillon.”

  “She told you yesterday she knew the man.”

  “Knowing him’s different than boning him.”

  “You think you might be jumping the gun? He called her yesterday to give her a heads-up about your ass being in jail. They go way back to patrol days, decide to get a drink—no big thing.”

  “Well, you didn’t see her.”

  “So cut the woman some slack. She wants to look decent around a guy like Dillon. I seem to recall you primping your hair and shit when you first met with Max Donovan.”

  “Yeah, and look where that got me. She’s got something for Dillon.”

  “So what if she does? The dude’s been decent to us, right?” He pointed an index finger at her. “You might’ve been in the doghouse with Tucker if he hadn’t schmoozed her and her smitten little ass on your behalf.”

  Ellie plopped herself down at the desk across from him. “Maybe. So what’s up with the call records?”

  “We got a ton of calls back and forth with her parents—I guess that’s normal for college students these days, can’t cut the cord. Local carry-out joints every couple of days. Bunch of girlfriends—the reverse directory listings come back to a handful of girls on that list you got from the mom.”

  “Including Courtney Chang?”

  “Yep, a bunch between her and your girl Courtney. No Keith. No other dudes. No late-night booty calls. This girl was chaste, man.”

  Ellie shook her head. “Courtney couldn’t help us find this Keith guy either. I did get a photograph, though. Figured I’d search records for first name Keith with a lip piercing. See what comes up.”

  Ellie’s phone buzzed at her waist. According to the screen, it was Jess.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You busy?”

  “Always. What’s up?”

  “Please tell me you don’t have something going on with DJ Anus So Hottica.”

  “Do I even want to know what you’re talking about?”

  “Your e-mail.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you to stay out of my cyber shit? There’s, like, actually real laws against that stuff. I am a cop, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “Can’t help it, El. You leave your new-mail alert open on your laptop so your messages pop up and interfere with my porn surfing.”

  “Nice. That’s an image I want in my head all day.”

  “Oh, trust me, the images I’ve been working on are so much better.”

  “So, I’m sorry. What was the point of all this?”

  “Your e-mail. I couldn’t exactly ignore a subject line like ‘Predator,’ could I? So I opened the message, and what do I see but that electronica-loving poseur. I’m all for you finding some barely legal boy toy, but that lightweight?”

  “Seriously, Jess. Who are you talking about?”

  “The picture in your e-mail. He goes by DJ Anorexotica.” He dragged out the name dramatically.

  “What picture? Wait. Are you talking about an e-mail from someone named Courtney Chang?”

  “Yeah, I guess. The sender address says ChangBang@macmail. That plus the subject line had me, shall we say, intrigued.”

  “Jesus, Jess. It’s an e-mail on a case. You mean you know the guy in that picture?”

  “Duh. What have I been saying? You’re not going out with him, are you?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  6:00 P.M.

  In the bedroom of her Upper East Side Yorkville apartment, Katie Battle removed a beaded necklace and matching chandelier earrings from the thin top dresser drawer that held her jewelry. She was thirty-one years old and still used the same dresser that she had taken from her parents’ home when she moved out after college.

  A few years ago, after selling enough real estate to buy a small chunk of her own, she had nearly splurged on new furniture to fill the place. The market had been going strong for three straight years. She had a five-digit savings account. She was feeling confident. She picked out each and every piece herself, circling items in different home decorating catalogs, making sure that everything would work together.

  But then, for whatever reason, she had not gone through with the purchases. Had she sensed that the market would slow? Did she know her mother’s physician would suddenly conclude that she could no longer negotiate living on her own?

  Now the savings account was gone, and Katie got by month to month, barely managing to cover her own mortgage, her mother’s assisted living, and the taxes on her parents’ Forest Hills home, which she was renting out for some extra income in the hopes that she could get more in a sale once the market turned around. She used credit cards as necessary to cover unexpected expenses and then “saved” as she could to pay down the balances. Just when she thought she might be caught up and could begin building a nest egg again, some other cost arose and she’d be back in the red.

  In short, Katie was well into adulthood and still playing financial Whack a Mole.

  She threaded the hooks of the earrings through each of her lobes, and then draped the necklace across her bare collarbone and clasped it beneath dark brown, wavy hair that fell just past her shoulders. She closed the jewelry drawer of her dresser, opened the next drawer down, and selected a black lace bra and matching thong bikini panty. She spritzed herself with a lavender-scented body spray that rested on top of the dresser, and then turned to the black cocktail dress already laid out on her bed.

  Before walking out of the apartment, she pulled a tube of lipstick from her metallic clutch purse and slid a gloss of berry stain across her full lips. She blotted her lips against each other, checking out her pout in a compact mirror for good measure before locking the bolt on her apartment door.

  On the elevator ride to the lobby, she began the transition into another persona. The vestiges of Katie Battle—devoted daughter, dogged real estate agent, incessant BlackBerry fiddler—began to melt away. She ran a dark burgundy fingernail across the beads of her necklace, felt the plunging neckline of her silk jersey dress, hugging the curves of her figure like a second skin. She stood up straighter. Taller. Pushed the locks of dark hair away from her heart-shaped face.

  By the time she completed her taxi ride down to 44 East Forty-fourth Street, her mental transformation was complete. Good-bye, Katie. Hello, Miranda.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  6:30 P.M.

  Jess didn’t know the real name of the man he knew as DJ Anorexotica, but did know that “An-ex,” as he also referred to himself, would be performing that night at a bar on the Lower East Side called Gaslight.

  Of course Jess could not bring himself to use the word performing to describe An-ex’s act without using air quotes. And he couldn’t use air quotes without grimacing at the fact that he was using air quotes.

  Jess was still complaining about accompanying Ellie on her mission when they emerged from the F train at Delancey and Essex. “You’ve got his picture. You know where to find him, doing that thing he calls performing. Why do you need me?”

  “Because you actually know the guy, and you’re not expected at the Shake Shack for another three hours.” Neither Ellie nor Jess could bring themselves to call the strip club where he worked by its actual name, so they enjoyed making up creative placeholders. �
��Besides, all you were going to do in the interim was watch that marathon of Real Housewives of Atlanta you’ve had clogging up the DVR for the last two weeks.”

  “Well, if it’s clogging up the machine, I should be at home watching important episodes, shouldn’t I?”

  “Jess, for me, seriously, quit with the bitching.”

  Most sibling relationships, like all relationships, involve a certain amount of give-and-take. But the balance of giving and taking between Jess and Ellie was sufficiently off kilter—in ways that both of them recognized—that the words “for me,” spoken by Ellie to Jess, usually did the trick.

  Ellie had her reasons for bringing her brother along on this trip, and that would have to be—and was—enough for Jess.

  The bar was a nondescript storefront with a heavy wooden entrance adorned by a burning gaslight. When Jess opened the door, a discordant blend of Spanish-feeling rhythms and cacophonous mechanical noises set to a techno beat spilled out.

  “I see that your scumbag of choice tonight has already begun making his noise,” Jess said.

  A small crowd of about a dozen people was dispersed loosely across an open rectangular dance floor between them and the stage. Three thin young women with an approximate collective height of eighteen feet who were certainly aspiring models lingered just inside the bar’s entrance. A couple stood closer to the bar: she in a turtleneck and plaid skirt, he in wide-wale cords and a pea coat, and both undoubtedly from the Upper East Side. Next to them were a couple of fifty-year-olds in black cotton, denim, and leather who looked like they could have hung out with Deborah Harry and the Ramones during their CBGB heydays.

  “Eclectic,” Ellie said.

  “This is the early-bird after-work crowd. You should come back in seven hours.”

  “So what’s the story on this place?”

  “Alternative. Underground.”

  “Like a rave?”

  She heard the group of models chuckle next to her. “Oh my God,” one whispered.