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 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 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 wi
th 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 suggested a fear 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
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 cl
osed 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
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.
Alafair Burke Page 3
