Alafair Burke

by Ellie Hatcher 03 - 212 (v5)

  She’d first learned of the site more than a year earlier. When she saw its description of a “community of escorts, hobbyists, and service providers,” she was certain it was a sting, some kind of trap by law enforcement. But then some of the other girls vouched for it. “The amazon-dot-com of the sex trade,” one girl had called the site. Even Stacy had found herself flinching at the rawness of the language as she clicked yes or no to the various services one could offer. But eventually the site had enabled her to leave the escort services behind and go out on her own. Between the hardcore hobbyists who found her on this site, and the more casual clients who used Craig’s List, she had more than enough business.

  Next she checked her Hotmail account, the one that was untraceable, the one she used for her Craig’s List postings.

  She saw her ads as a form of creative writing—not a particularly challenging form, but a form nevertheless. Like dirty little greeting cards, her online listings all followed the same clichéd storylines—bored housewife looking for adventure, pent-up sales executive needs to indulge her fantasy life, graduate student available for private modeling. In the norms of the sex industry, potential johns saw these ads for what they were—a thinly veiled cover for an illegal offer of sex for money.

  The one strain of continuity through all of her ads was the description of herself as an “honest and attractive brunette.” Stacy didn’t let her dates have her phone number. Being untraceable minimized the chances of getting caught.

  But she didn’t mind regulars. If someone wanted to date her again, and she wanted to accept, she told them all they had to do was peruse the Craig’s List postings. Women Seeking Men. Look for the “honest and attractive brunette.”

  She scrolled through her in-box on Hotmail, past the inevitable Viagra and diet-related spam, searching for any mention of Craig’s List in the subject lines of the new messages. She found one toward the bottom of the page and clicked on it.

  Someone had responded to the ad she’d placed that morning.

  I am an honest and attractive brunette. I came to New York for adventure but am having difficulty finding a place to stay for the night and hopefully will find a good man to take care of me. This is for real. Please write back with your phone number if you are interested.

  She opened the reply and immediately noticed the return address: GoodMan@hotmail.com. Someone had apparently created an account specifically for this message. Probably had a suspicious wife who snuck too many peeks at his BlackBerry.

  I’m sorry to hear that your search for adventure has left you stranded. I think I can help you out if you can meet with me tomorrow night. I’m very generous towards the right kind of woman under the right terms. No phone number to offer, but e-mail me back with a photograph and a place where you’d feel comfortable meeting, and we’ll work out the details in person.

  Stacy was accustomed to discovering that she was not the only half of the transaction who required anonymity. She could tell this guy was a repeat player. There were no explicit references to sex for money, lest she be a decoy working a police sting. But all of the not-so-subtle hints were there: veiled references to generosity, terms, details. He knew the drill.

  She clicked on the reply button but found herself hesitating as she began to type the text that would finalize the particulars of the date. She rose from the bed and stood again in front of her easel.

  This time, she realized what had been bothering her about the woman’s face. It was her mouth. It was too relaxed. Too tranquil. Even more than the strangling marks on her neck, what had been so disturbing about those pictures of Miranda had been her lips—twisted unnaturally, the kind of bizarre facial expression sometimes captured in the awkward timing of a bad snapshot. Stacy still could not believe that Miranda had died with her mouth frozen in that state.

  She painted over the mouth in putty gray, using the tip of her brush to sketch more angular lines that she would eventually trace over with color.

  That blond detective had lectured her about the dangers of what she was doing. She had tried to manipulate her into “changing her lifestyle,” as she put it. And she’d used the horrible things that had been done to Miranda in an attempt to persuade her. She could still hear that tough and somehow slightly condescending tone in the detective’s voice when she’d told her, “The next time, it could be you.” The detective even forced Stacy to add her cell number to her phone so she’d have it any time she needed—“even just to talk, Stacy.”

  Using her name with her, like they were friends. Ironically, it was a move Stacy used with her dates—or at least the ones who seemed to want some semblance of intimacy.

  Well, the detective was wrong. Miranda didn’t deserve what happened to her. No one did. But Miranda had never been street-smart. She didn’t have that intuition that could tell her right away if a guy was a problem or not. Stacy did. She was a good judge of character. And she was smarter than Miranda.

  And she knew the police were full of shit because they also warned her to stay away from Heather. Maybe Heather—or Tanya from Baltimore—had bolted. But there was no way she had anything to do with those heinous things that had been done to Miranda. She probably just got scared when she saw Miranda’s picture on the news after she was killed. She probably decided to give up the life and get the hell out of Dodge—sort of like what that blond detective wanted for Stacy.

  She walked back to her bed and typed the reply e-mail. She attached a photograph of herself, the one in a bikini and a cowboy hat.

  She hit the send key. Easy money.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  4:15 P.M.

  Words—tiny, meaningless details scribbled on yellowed sheets of paper—could make all the difference. Beneath fresh light, the trivial can become significant. Cold can grow hot. And thin reeds of data can blossom and expand into indisputable evidence.

  Ellie had lost count of the number of times she had come across that one nugget—that one piece of the picture that pulled the entire mosaic together—in some dusty, old, long-forgotten police file. Now she and Rogan were scouring Tanya Abbott’s decade-old prostitution file in the hope of a lucky break.

  It was only a two-page report from the Baltimore PD and a few pages of notes they had managed to obtain from the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office, not like the bulky cold-case murder books, so rich in detail, that Ellie had grown accustomed to searching. But this thin stack of fax paper was the one and only piece of Tanya Abbott’s history they could count on. They would start with what they knew about her ten years ago and work their way forward.

  Rogan was learning what he could about the psychiatrist whose name had been jotted down so haphazardly in the court’s dismissal of the prostitution charge against Tanya. “DM’d,” the judge had scrawled in large block letters, followed by the cryptic notation, “in counseling, per Dr. Lyle Hewson.”

  While Rogan was tracking down Hewson, Ellie was trying to get a bead on Tanya’s family. When Tanya was arrested, she listed a Baltimore address, as well as a corresponding telephone number. Ellie tried the number first, but the Asian woman who answered managed to explain in broken English that she’d had the number for two years and had never heard of anyone named “Saundra” Abbott. Then Ellie had called Baltimore’s Office of Land Records and learned that the address Tanya had given to the arresting officer had been sold three years earlier by the estate of Marion Abbott.

  Her next attempt had been to call the new owner of the property. The man who answered knew no more about the former occupants of his home than had the Asian woman who’d inherited their telephone number.

  He was also only slightly easier to understand, thanks to a thick southern accent.

  “Abbotts? No, can’t say that rings a bell, but I can’t swear it would. I dealt with some realtor. Lady said the owner bought the farm and the family needed to sell. Had a big debt on the place, she said, so it was a good deal for me—except for the parts that were falling over. You might check with som
e of the neighbors around here, though. There’s some old-timers…Names? Nope, can’t help you there.”

  Ellie thanked the man for his time, hung up the phone, and opened Google Maps on her computer. She typed in the old Abbott address and then hit the link for “street view.”

  Her screen displayed a street-level view of what had once been Tanya Abbott’s home. The house was a nondescript single-level ranch. The exterior’s beige paint looked fresh enough, but from the aluminum ladder and the loose stacks of roofing tile visible in the driveway, Ellie guessed that the current owner had bought himself a fixer-upper.

  She used her mouse to do a virtual walk to the south and then clicked on the house next door to the former Abbott residence. The neighbor’s street address popped up at the top of her screen. After a quick detour to the reverse phone directory, Ellie dialed the number.

  She knew that Google used still panoramic photography to replicate her online stroll through Baltimore. Even so, as she listened to the trills through her handset, she caught herself watching the photo on her screen as if she might actually spot the person inside answering the phone.

  “Hello?”

  It was either a little kid or a woman with a really stupid voice. She started to ask whether Mommy was home, but thought better of it, just in case she was dealing with a Betty Boop.

  “Is this the person who owns the home? I’m calling from the police department.”

  “The police? Am I in trouble?”

  Definitely a kid.

  “Nope. I just want to talk to one of your parents. Are they home?”

  “I only have a mommy.”

  “Well, is she home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you go get her?”

  “She’s exercising in her room.”

  “Okay, well, can you go get her for me?” This kid was one tough customer.

  “I’m not supposed to bug her when she’s exercising.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Benjamin.”

  She made a mental note to scold Benjamin’s mother for her failure to cover the whole don’t-talk-to-strangers terrain. “This is very important, Benjamin. I’ll tell her it was my decision to get her, okay?”

  “But she has someone in there with her. And she told me never, ever, ever go in there again when she’s exercising with someone.”

  Ellie had a good idea of the kind of exercise Benjamin’s mom was doing in her bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, and she didn’t want to be responsible for the baggage the little guy might carry around for life if he opened Mommy’s door right now.

  “How long have you lived in your house, Benjamin?”

  “A long time. Like, forever.”

  “Were you born there?”

  “I don’t know. I think babies come from the hospital. But my big brother’s sixteen and he measured himself on the same door as me, down in the basement, and I’m taller now than he was when he was seven.”

  So Benjamin’s mom had lived in the house for at least nine years.

  “What’s your mom’s name, Benjamin?”

  “Anne. Anne Hahn.”

  “I need you to knock on your mom’s door. Okay, Benjamin? Don’t open it,” she emphasized. “Don’t look inside. Just knock. Really loud. And tell her the police are on the phone.”

  It took another couple of rounds to reassure Benjamin he wouldn’t get in trouble, but she eventually heard him comply. And comply he did. The kid had a strong fist and stronger lungs.

  “Hello?”

  The woman sounded simultaneously worried, exhausted, and pained. Apparently her exercise partner was a very talented trainer.

  “Ms. Hahn. My name’s Ellie Hatcher. I’m calling from the New York Police Department about your former neighbor, Tanya Abbott.”

  “Tanya?” The stress in the woman’s voice fell away as she caught her breath and tuned in to the conversation.

  “Yes, she may be a material witness to a homicide here, and we’re trying to find family members who might stay in touch with her.”

  “I haven’t heard a word from the girl since they sold that house—what? It must have been three years ago.”

  “That was after Marion died?”

  “Her mother. That’s right. Tanya was, you know. Well, maybe you don’t know. She was a troubled girl. In and out of that house, back and forth all the time like it was some kind of youth hostel. I tell you, Marion was a saint. She had nothing in life but that daughter of hers, and she worked her tail off for that girl. And Tanya? Well, she was a good little girl back in the day. Even used to babysit my eldest when he was just a peanut. But late teens? I tell ya. You’ve never seen a girl go so fast from teacher’s pet to…well, I’ll go ahead and say it: a Little Lolita is what she became.”

  Ellie realized that the one activity Anne Hahn might enjoy more than exercising was gossiping about her neighbors.

  “You said Tanya had a habit of coming and going from the house. Did Marion have men going in and out of there as well?” A sudden shift from the honor roll to promiscuity was a telltale sign of sexual abuse, and most of the abuse happened close to home.

  “No way. Marion wasn’t like that. If she even dated, I surely never saw sign of it. My guess is she got knocked up at nineteen and learned her lesson. Kept her knees shut ever since.”

  “Tanya was an only child?”

  “That’s right.”

  Ellie reached for the photo album she’d found in Tanya’s bedroom and flipped through it, stopping again on the page depicting a young, happy Tanya with an even younger blond boy. Something about the boy still felt so familiar. It had to be some resemblance to Tanya, but she still couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “Are you sure? Maybe she had a half-brother? We found some pictures of a kid who was probably eight or so years younger than her.”

  “The sperm donor who knocked up Marion could have impregnated half of Baltimore for all she knew, but a relationship with a half-sibling? Huh-uh. Marion made it real clear the dad wasn’t around. The kid could have been anyone from the neighborhood—Tanya baby-sat for a whole bunch of us.”

  “Her mom was pregnant at nineteen and died three years ago? She must have been young.”

  “Yeah, like forty-seven or something. Cervical cancer. Said she should have just ripped out all the equipment after she had Tanya. Poor thing spent that final year worrying about her medical bills.”

  “They didn’t have much money, I take it.”

  “You kidding? No one who lives around here does.”

  “What about Tanya? We got the impression that she might have had a private counselor or a psychiatrist about ten years ago?”

  “News to me. Now, she might’ve needed it, but there’s no way Marion could’ve afforded something like that, even before she got sick.”

  “We got the impression Tanya might have access to some funds. Maybe Marion had life insurance?”

  “No, I would’ve heard about that. I went to see Marion a few times a week there at the end. She was borrowing against everything. If she’d had life insurance, she would’ve been borrowing on that, too. Marion didn’t even have health insurance. She worked as a domestic, you know?”

  “A housekeeper?”

  “No, like a nanny, I guess. She’d treat those families like her own. Come to think of it, that kid you saw in the pictures with Tanya could’ve been one of the kids Marion nannied. A couple of the families she worked for along the way were real good about letting Marion bring Tanya around with her, like they were all one big happy family. Shoot—I should be able to remember some names, but nothing’s coming to mind. I know one of the guys was some big muckety-muck. She worked for that family for years. Doesn’t matter, though. When she got sick, none of them came to take care of her, so it only goes so far. You know?”

  “Can you think of anything else I should know?”

  “Well, there is one thing, but, well, I probably shouldn’t say anything.”

  I probably
shouldn’t say anything.

  Those five words had been the countdown to countless gossip sessions over the decades. Oscar Wilde’s downfall could probably be traced to some woman in a corset, sipping tea in a parlor of Victorian London, whispering, “I probably shouldn’t say anything.”

  “It’s not catty chatter,” Ellie assured the woman. “It’s background material for an official police investigation.”

  Anne plowed ahead. “It’s just funny what you said about Tanya having some money. I always wondered about that. I should have figured that girl stashed something away. And to think she let her mother die worrying about hospital bills.”

  “What made you think Tanya was holding out?”

  “Because I talked to her one day, right about the time the realtor put up the For Sale sign outside their house. Must’ve been just a month after Marion died. I asked her, wasn’t there some way she could hold on to the house on her own. She said she tried, but that the money was all tied up.”

  “What money was that?”

  “Exactly. I pressed her on it, and she got real nervous and said she had some money from an uncle but that she had to use it for school. Well, that surprised the heck out of me, because as far as I knew, Marion was an only child, and Tanya’s daddy was never part of the picture. So I said, ‘Well, you’re sort of old to be going back to school, aren’t you?’ And she said something like, ‘Well, that’s what the money’s for, and you never know.’ Then she scurried back into the house, and I never thought it my place to ask her about it again. Tanya moved out not long after that, and I’ve never seen her since.”

  Ellie thanked Anne for her time and hung up the phone just as Rogan was doing the same.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “More questions than answers,” she said. “Tanya’s mom was a nanny. Died about three years ago with a ton of debt. The bank sold the house from under Tanya. The neighbor did say Tanya mentioned something once about having some money for school that an uncle gave her, but the neighbor doesn’t think Tanya even has an uncle.”