212 eh-3

by Alafair Burke

  “Outside Paul Bandon’s apartment. Donovan and I didn’t know what the hell was going on, so we kept working on Dillon’s arrest warrant. See what happens when you don’t call people?”

  “I’m sorry. It was total chaos.”

  “I gotcha. Just be sure to call your boy, Donovan. I could tell he was worried about you. He was the one who sent me up here to track down Bandon. He wanted to make sure the warrant got signed.”

  “You won’t be needing it now.”

  She flipped the phone shut, seeing no reason to tell Rogan that her first call—back at Dillon’s, before she’d even started the engine—had been to Max. She knew it meant something about her feelings for him. Something good.

  As she merged onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, she thought about everything she’d learned in the past few hours and realized how off base she’d been. Not unlike those unis who refused to jump a former cop’s fence, she had subconsciously bestowed an irrebuttable presumption of innocence upon Nick Dillon, but he’d been in front of them—guilty—the entire time. He had killed Robert Mancini for threatening to peel away a carefully constructed facade that shielded his most coveted secret—a secret about his very identity, a secret that shouldn’t have to be concealed.

  And just as she’d assumed the best of Nick Dillon because he came from her world, she’d assumed the worst of Sam Sparks because he did not. She had rationalized her obsession with him, first because of the way he’d treated her at the penthouse and then for his refusal to cooperate with the investigation. But the truth was, more than ten years after she’d moved to New York, people like Sparks still had a way of making her feel like the little girl from Wichita who hadn’t known which fork to use until an investment banker boyfriend finally told her. If she had set aside her emotions—if she had looked at Sparks more as a person than a stereotype—she might have seen the truth earlier.

  She had been right about one thing: Dillon had been using Robin Tucker, manipulating her obvious desire for companionship in the hope of obtaining inside information about the investigation. But Ellie had underestimated her lieutenant. As much as she must have wanted a relationship with Dillon, she had never told him about the missing girl’s connection to the Mancini case, even as Tanya Abbott’s photograph dominated local headlines.

  Ellie was confident that they could clear the Mancini and Battle cases, but that still left the question of who killed Megan Gunther. If Dillon didn’t know Tanya was the woman with Mancini that night, then he was not the man who killed Megan and left Tanya for dead. She’d been so off the mark about Dillon and Sparks. What had she missed about Megan and Tanya?

  She thought again about the isolated facts they had gathered about Tanya Abbott. She was an only child from Baltimore. Her mother had worked as a nanny. The family was poor enough that Tanya had lost the house when her mother died but somehow still had money set aside for college tuition. A bright and vibrant preteen, she was busted for prostitution by the time she was twenty years old, when she managed to have access to a private counselor to get her out of criminal charges.

  It was as if the girl had a guardian angel watching over her until one morning, when her roommate was stabbed to death in front of her and her life fell to shit.

  And then Ellie saw what she’d been missing.

  Distracted by the noise of Robert Mancini and Katie Battle and Sam Sparks and Prestige Parties, she hadn’t focused on what they’d known about Tanya Abbott. When they’d seen the calls between Tanya and Bandon, they’d been so sure it was part of Tanya’s current life—the one that had taken her into the bed of Robert Mancini on his last night. But maybe this wasn’t about the present at all. Maybe this was all about the past.

  Ellie slowed to a crawl in the right lane as she juggled her cell phone and scrolled down to a Baltimore number she had dialed two days earlier.

  “Hello?”

  Anne Hahn sounded annoyed but not groggy. The call to Tanya Abbott’s former neighbor was late, but at least she hadn’t woken the woman.

  “Ms. Hahn. It’s Ellie Hatcher from up in New York again. I’m sorry to call so late.”

  “Benjamin, I told you to go to sleep. Now. Before I put you into that bed myself.” Her tone lowered an octave. “Sorry about that. Go on.”

  “You mentioned that Tanya’s mother worked for a family of some means?”

  “I’m not sure how rich they were, but, yeah, he was some big fancy lawyer.”

  “Could his name have been Paul Bandon?”

  “Bandon…Bandon. Maybe?”

  “His wife’s name is Laura. He has a son named Alex.”

  “Alex.” Anne’s voice sharpened in recognition. “Yes. There was definitely a little boy named Alex. Tanya talked about him all the time. She was a few years older and, having been an only child, I think she kind of glommed on to him as a sort of little brother. She was the same way with my older son when she’d babysit him. It was always Alex this, and Alex that.”

  “Do you remember when this would have been?”

  Ellie realized now why she had recognized the towheaded kid in the photographs with Tanya. She had seen an older version of the same kid in the high school graduation picture on Judge Bandon’s bench when she testified on Wednesday morning.

  “Shoot,” Anne said, “probably twenty years ago.”

  “Tanya would have been about ten years old?”

  “Well, Marion worked for them for a few years, I’d say from when Tanya was ten to—um—probably about fifteen or so?”

  “And were these the years when you said Tanya was the teacher’s-pet type or—”

  “The Lolita years?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That period of time would have included both. Tanya started changing when she was about thirteen, if I had to say. At first it seemed like the usual teenage girl insecurities. She got quiet, sort of withdrawn. And then slowly she started acting like someone else altogether—sulky, full of attitude, darn right inappropriate when it came to males.”

  In other words, all the signs of sexual precociousness.

  “Thanks for your time, Ms. Hahn. Sorry again for calling so late.”

  “That’s all right. Now you’ve got me wondering whatever happened to that guy she worked for. I think he was a big deal with the government. Marion used to tell me, just you watch, someday he’ll be on the Supreme Court.”

  As Ellie flipped her phone shut, she wondered if that had been before or after Marion Abbott found out what Paul Bandon was up to with her daughter. She took the Seventy-ninth Street exit off the parkway. Bandon’s apartment was right across town.

  She had tried to call Rogan in case he was still on the Upper East Side. He hadn’t picked up, but she found her partner sooner than expected.

  Turning east off of Park, she slammed on her brakes at the sight of uniformed officers dropping gate-style iron blockades at the entrance onto Seventy-eighth Street. Beyond the stopgap, she spotted two fire trucks, an ambulance, and at least six marked police vehicles, all with lights flashing. Even the NYPD’s version of SWAT, the Emergency Service Unit, had sent an armored van. A swarm of medical, fire, and police personnel stood among the vehicles in the street. And they all appeared to be looking upward.

  Her gaze tried to follow theirs, but all she could see from the driver’s seat was the third floor of Paul Bandon’s building and the grimy ceiling of the fleet car’s interior. A car horn blared, followed immediately in New York style by several others, each more urgent and sustained than the previous.

  She pulled up parallel against the metal blockades to get out of the way of through traffic on Park Avenue, then flashed her shield to the uniform officers as she stepped out of the car. As she walked around the barriers, she saw Rogan at the epicenter of the chaos, speaking intensely to Paul Bandon. Even from this distance, she could tell he was using what she called his military voice.

  What had Paul Bandon done to cause this scene?

  Rogan looked surprised when he saw her approac
hing.

  “I’ve been trying to call,” she said. He glanced at the bedlam around him and then gave her a look that said he’d been too busy to answer the phone.

  “So you know?” she asked.

  “Know what?”

  “It’s him.” She pointed at Bandon lest Rogan miss her point. “Tanya Abbott’s mother was the Bandons’ nanny in Baltimore. That’s why he and Tanya were calling each other. He’s known Tanya since she was ten years old.”

  She’d already known in her gut that she was right, but if she’d carried any doubts, the expression on Judge Bandon’s face would have washed them away. He’d appeared panicked when she’d first spotted him with Rogan, but now his face fell in that same way she’d seen so many times when a suspect knew it was over. Paul Bandon knew that all of his lies—everything he’d been trying to hide for nearly two decades—had finally caught up to him.

  Rogan, however, looked confused.

  “This is about Alex. The son. He’s on the roof.”

  Ellie looked to the sky and understood now why the crowd in the street had been gazing upward. She made out the dark outline of a body on the roof of Bandon’s building. He appeared to be dangerously close to the edge.

  “He saw me,” Rogan said.

  “Who?”

  “Alex, the son. I was parked around the corner. Right after I got off the phone with you, he came up Park Avenue from the south and saw me. He did a double take, so I knew he recognized me from when we were here the other morning. I figured he’d say something to his father, so I stuck around in case to explain about the warrant. I was about to leave when I saw a woman pointing up at the roof. I called in a response team.”

  “You have to get him down,” Bandon said. “You have to save my son.”

  Rogan resumed an authoritative tone. “Like I said, everyone here’s gonna work to do that, Judge, but you need to help us help your son. We’ve got ESU here. They’ve got a guy who’s trained to talk to ju—to people who are distraught like Alex.” He had almost slipped and referred to the man’s son as a jumper. “It might help us to know what he’s doing up there.”

  Bandon’s lips parted, but no words came out.

  “I know what happened back in Baltimore with Tanya,” she said. “Did Alex find out about it?”

  He shook his head. “No. Well, I mean, yes. But he’s known about it for years. So has Laura. Jesus—Laura. She’s on a spa trip in the country. I need to call her.”

  Tanya Abbott had not been the one to post those messages on Campus Juice. And Paul Bandon had not been the one who tried to kill Tanya, taking her roommate’s life in the process. It had been his son, Alex.

  “You need to help us with information right now, Judge.”

  “Tanya and I, well, it sounds like you know. We had an affair a long time ago.”

  “An affair?” She pictured herself delivering a solid right hook to his temple. Sex with a thirteen-year-old girl did not constitute an affair.

  “Nothing happened until she was fourteen. And Tanya was very mature.”

  She let him continue. This wasn’t the time to rid Bandon of the rationalizations he had created during sixteen long years of denial.

  “When Tanya’s mother found out about us, I told Laura everything. She stayed with me, and we agreed with Marion that we’d help her out financially.”

  “You bought her off.”

  “We came to an agreement. Our families were very close, Detective.”

  Obviously. She held her tongue. And that right hook.

  “You were the one who got her out of that prostitution arrest in Baltimore,” she said.

  His eyes were glued to the roof of the building, impatient to get past this conversation but realizing that any attempt to avoid it would only delay turning full attention to his son’s safety.

  “That and plenty of other problems back then. We set up a college tuition fund, but the money just sat there, since Tanya didn’t have any inclination. And for the last several years, things had finally quieted down. I thought things were fine. And then she called me at the end of May, saying she was in trouble.”

  “After Robert Mancini was killed.”

  He nodded. “She said she’d witnessed a murder. I had no idea she was in New York, let alone what she was up to with NYU. I tried to get her to come forward, but she was convinced it wouldn’t do any good. She never saw the man’s face or heard any names, but she remembered hearing him say something to Mancini about blackmailing a cop. She didn’t think she could trust the police, and she was terrified of losing this chance to start over.”

  “So when we filed a motion in the Mancini case, you grabbed it.”

  “It was a way to keep an eye on the case. Let her know if there were going to be any problems for her. I was trying to keep her at arm’s length, but she kept calling to see if I’d heard anything about the case. Plus the account we set up for her wasn’t enough. She called for money a few times, and I gave her a couple bucks here and there but knew it had to stop. Then she called Thursday, saying her roommate was being threatened on the Internet. She wanted to know if there was anything I could do. All that dysfunction, all that chaos, that I thought my family had finally put in the past when we moved, it’s been one thing or another all summer.”

  “And your family knew about this?”

  He nodded. “Not at first, but yes, eventually. Laura stopped by my chambers last month when I was on the phone with Tanya. She knew something was up, but even then, I minimized it as a onetime cry for help.”

  “But she didn’t believe you,” Ellie said. Like Robin Tucker, so suspicious after an ex-husband cheated on her, Laura Bandon was still broken by her husband’s deception. She would be the kind of wife who snuck occasional peeks at her husband’s phone. She would have seen the calls to and from a Baltimore cell number.

  “She looked at my phone and saw all the calls. She was furious. We fought. She said I had to make it stop. Tanya was ruining our lives again. I didn’t know what to say. I told her that Tanya was blackmailing me.”

  “Was she?”

  “No, but I was afraid what she might do if I pushed her away.”

  “When did Alex find out Tanya was back?”

  “The same day. It was the end of August. He overheard us fighting. I went to his room afterward and explained the whole thing.”

  “Along with the blackmail embellishment?”

  He nodded. “But I never told him where Tanya lived or the alias she was using.”

  Bandon was reaching for some piece of evidence that might exonerate his son. If Alex had not known where to find Tanya, then he could not have killed her.

  “Have you met with Tanya since you talked to Alex about her? Is it possible he saw you?”

  She could tell that Bandon wanted to deny the possibility, but the flash of recognition in his face was unmistakable. “A couple times since then,” he said. “I slipped out of the apartment to give her a little cash.”

  If Alex had trailed his father on one of his outings, he could have followed Tanya home from there. He’d had a full month to nail down her schedule and plant the postings on Campus Juice as a diversion.

  “You told us how proud you were of your future Harvard law student. You knew he was disturbed enough to kill an innocent woman, and didn’t get him some help?”

  “I had no idea. He ran into the apartment fifteen minutes ago yelling that the cops knew and were after him and everything was over for our family.”

  “But Tanya must have told you.”

  “No. She called me from the hospital. She said the man who stabbed her wore a ski mask. She assumed that whoever killed Mancini had finally tracked her down. The next thing I know, her face is on the front page of the paper as a missing person and the two of you are at my door. I haven’t heard from her since.”

  They’d been so consumed by Tanya’s cell phone records that they had never bothered asking for a list of the calls from her hospital room.

  “Now,
please, do something. Alex is—oh Jesus, he’s up there. He’s going to jump.”

  Ellie heard a commotion near the barriers at Park Avenue and turned to find a cameraman jumping out of an NY1 van.

  “Jesus,” Rogan said. “How the hell do they manage to get here before our negotiator? Hey,” he yelled to the unis, “get them the hell out of here.”

  “Wait,” Ellie said, holding out her arm to stop him. “Let them film. But on three conditions: they have to announce the address; they have to say we’ve got a twenty-one-year-old male Columbia student on the roof; and they need to mention that detectives involved with the Tanya Abbott case are on the scene.”

  Rogan turned to deliver the instructions.

  “What are you doing?” Bandon asked.

  “I’m trying to save your son. Tanya doesn’t know Alex is the one who hurt her. She still has childhood pictures of him. At least as of last night, she was in the city, and she’s probably following the news.”

  “You think she’ll come here,” he said.

  “She might. And if she does, she could be our best chance of talking your son off that roof.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  10:20 P.M.

  Tanya Abbott let the paperback drop to the floor beside the sofa. The mystery novel had kept her occupied for the entire day since she’d found it in the nightstand drawer, but now it was over. She wasn’t ready to sleep yet either. She was stir-crazy.

  She’d walked out of St. Vincent’s on Friday night, knowing that once the hospital dug further for insurance information, they’d realize the real Heather Bradley was buried in Arizona. She thought about going to Penn Station and catching the first train down to Baltimore, but she knew herself too well. Once she was back home, she’d crash with Mark. Or Trent. Or maybe Saundra. Either way, she’d fall into her old ways. Drinking too much. Floating bad checks. Taking cheap dates. Feeling lucky not to get busted.

  So instead she’d come here.

  When she’d moved to New York last spring, it was supposed to be a truly fresh start. New name. New place. New age. None of the same bad habits. She had an entire summer before classes started so she could adjust to her new life.