212

by Alafair Burke

  Sparks’s smirk widened into a full-blown smile. “You can apologize after these shoes have been picked up.”

  Needless to say, Ellie did not apologize.

  “Mr. Sparks, your apartment is now officially a crime scene. I need you to leave.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did you hear my request, sir?”

  “Of course I heard you, but—”

  “Then I’m ordering you, for the second time now, to leave the premises.” Ellie intentionally used the kind of I-get-high-on-my-authority tone that made a person want to disobey.

  “I am not leaving my own—”

  “Sam Sparks, you’re under arrest for disobeying the lawful order of a police officer.” Ellie used her index finger to signal to a uniform officer who’d been observing cautiously from the front doorway. The officer removed his handcuffs from his duty belt.

  “You want to do the honors, or should I?” the officer asked.

  Sparks sucked his teeth and squinted at the officer’s nameplate. “Officer T. S. Amos. I’d warn against taking another step in my direction unless you plan to spend the rest of your NYPD career on parking patrol.”

  Ellie snatched the handcuffs from the uniform’s grasp. “Not to worry, Amos. This one’s all me.”

  PART I

  YOU CAN’T LET THIS GET TO YOU.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FOUR MONTHS LATER…WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24

  11:00 A.M.

  Ellie Hatcher raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  But the testimony she gave before Judge Paul Bandon was not really the whole truth. It was a dry, concise recitation of the basic facts—and only the facts—of a callout 120 days earlier. Time: 11:30 p.m. Location: a penthouse apartment at a building called 212 at the corner of Lafayette and Kenmare. Nature of the callout: a report of shots fired, followed by the subsequent discovery of a bullet-ridden body in the bedroom. The dead man: Robert “Robo” Mancini, bodyguard to Manhattan real estate mogul Sam Sparks.

  Ellie allowed herself a glance at Sparks, who sat at counsel table with a blank-faced stare next to his lawyer, Ramon Guerrero. According to her police report, Sparks was fifty-five years old, but looking at him this morning, she could understand why he enjoyed the serial companionship of the various models and aspiring starlets who graced his side on the society pages. It wasn’t just the money. With his square jaw, bright green eyes, and a permanent Clint Eastwood squint, Sparks exuded the kind of chiseled intensity that was catnip to a certain kind of woman.

  Ellie was surprised that he had bothered to make a personal appearance. It was probably the man’s way of signaling to Judge Bandon that this hearing was just as important to him as it was to the police. The only spectator on the government’s side of the courtroom, in the back bench by the entrance, was Genna Walsh, the victim’s sister. Ellie had told her there was no point coming into the city for the hearing, but she could not be dissuaded. Perhaps Sparks was not the only one trying to send a message.

  Assistant District Attorney Max Donovan continued to feed Ellie the straightforward questions that would lay the groundwork for today’s motion.

  “Did the decedent reside at the apartment in which his body was found—the penthouse in the 212 Building at 212 Lafayette?”

  “No, he did not. Mr. Mancini’s personal residence was in Hoboken, New Jersey.”

  “Did he own the apartment where his body was found?” Donovan asked.

  “No.”

  “Who does own the apartment?”

  “Mancini’s employer, Sam Sparks.”

  “In your thorough search of the crime scene, did you find any evidence to suggest that the decedent was staying long-term at the 212?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “No suitcase, no toothbrush or shaving kit, nothing along those lines?”

  “No.” Ellie hated the formal back-and-forth that was inherent in testifying. She’d prefer to sit across a desk from Judge Bandon and lay it all out for him. “In fact, Mr. Sparks himself told us that very night that the decedent was only using the apartment for the evening.”

  Again, Ellie reported just the facts. According to Sparks, he had completed the development at 212 six months earlier and kept the penthouse for himself as an investment and as a place to host the European investors who increasingly preferred downtown’s modern lofts to the more conventional temporary housing stock in midtown. To further justify the space as a corporate deduction, he allowed his personal assistant and security officers to make use of the apartment when the calendar permitted.

  Max Donovan had pinned photographs from the crime scene on a bulletin board next to the witness stand. Moving through the sequence of photos, Ellie described the disorder in the apartment—the open cabinets and drawers, the relatively few possessions in the apartment tossed to the floor like confetti.

  “From the looks of it,” Max said, “only the bathroom was spared?”

  In the final picture on the board, a single cabinet door in the otherwise tidy master bathroom was flung open, a pile of towels splayed on the tile floor beneath the sink.

  “That’s about right,” Ellie responded.

  “I guess extra rolls of toilet paper and back issues of Sports Illustrated aren’t the usual targets of a home invasion.”

  Max’s comment wasn’t especially funny, but the bar for comedy in courtrooms was notoriously low, and the remark drew a chuckle from Judge Bandon.

  The point of the testimony was simple: the violent home invasion on May 27 of a seventh-floor condo overlooking Lafayette Street had nothing to do with poor Robert Mancini until Robo got caught in the crossfire. The bodyguard’s relationship to the apartment was too inconsequential—too tangential—for the dead man to have been the premeditated target of the four bullets that eventually penetrated his naked torso that night.

  No, the crime had nothing to do with Mancini. The real target was either a robbery or Sam Sparks himself, and robbery seemed unlikely. Despite the expensive furnishings—two flat-screen televisions, a top-of-the-line stereo system, the rug that doubled as art—nothing was missing from the apartment.

  So now the police wanted to know more about Sam Sparks.

  From the witness stand, Ellie eyed a silver picture frame behind the bench. In the photograph, a smiling Paul Bandon beamed alongside a perfect-looking wife and a teenage boy in a royal blue cap and gown. Outside this courtroom, underneath the robes, Bandon was a normal person with a real life and a family. She wondered, if she cut through the bull and laid it all out for him, whether Judge Bandon would understand how the series of events beginning on May 27 had led her to the middle of a battle between the district attorney’s office and one of the most powerful men in the city.

  Maybe he would understand how she had felt when Sparks had sauntered into the crime scene, in his custom-cut tuxedo, somehow dry and picture-ready on that rain-soaked night, so put out by the disturbance at his pristine penthouse. Maybe he could imagine the disdainful looks Sparks had given to the police officers sullying his spotless pied-à-terre, the very officers who protected the appearance of order that allowed Sparks to earn billions in Manhattan real estate. Maybe he would realize that she hadn’t even meant to arrest Sparks and had immediately kicked herself for doing it. All she’d wanted was to wipe that smug look off his face, just long enough for him to give more of a rat’s ass about a dead man in his bedroom than the area rug in his foyer.

  If Ellie were telling the whole truth, she’d tell Judge Bandon that there was something about Sam Sparks that got under her skin. And she would try to explain that the only thing that bothered her more than that something was her own inability to maintain control in the face of it.

  Sparks’s rigid refusal to cooperate with the police investigation—all because of their first ill-fated encounter, an encounter in which she had played no small part—had contributed to a four-month investigation that led nowhere.

  “S
o, in sum, Detective Hatcher, would access to the financial and business records we are requesting from Mr. Sparks assist you with your investigation, Detective Hatcher?” Donovan asked.

  “We believe so,” she said, now looking directly at Judge Bandon. “Mr. Sparks is, as we all know, an extremely successful man. A break-in at one of his showcase personal properties would send a message to him. If he has financial or business enemies, we need to look into that.”

  “And to be clear, is Mr. Sparks himself a target of your investigation?”

  “Of course not,” Ellie said.

  If she were revealing the whole truth, she would have told Judge Bandon that at one point they of course had looked at Sparks as a suspect, but had quickly cleared him.

  “Is there anything you’d like to add to your testimony, Detective Hatcher?”

  In polite courtroom discourse, ADA Max Donovan referred to her as Detective Hatcher. But this was not the whole truth, either. If courtrooms had anything to do with the whole truth, he would call her Ellie. And one of them might have to disclose the fact that, just that morning, the testifying detective had woken up naked in the assistant district attorney’s bed.

  “No, thank you, Mr. Donovan.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  11:45 A.M.

  Megan Gunther rolled her fingertips lightly over the keyboard of her laptop computer. It was a nervous habit. If her typing fingers were positioned at the ready, she had a tendency to keep them moving—tiny little wiggles against the smooth black keys.

  She remembered begging her mother to teach her to type at the age of six. Her parents had just purchased a home computer, and Megan would eavesdrop as they sat side by side at her father’s desk, marveling at the wonders on the screen, all attributable to something called the Internet. But Megan had marveled at the speed of her mother’s fingers as they flew across the keyboard.

  She glanced at the round white clock that hung above the blank blackboard behind Professor Ellen Stein. Eleven forty-five. Fifteen more minutes. Thirty-five minutes of class had passed, and the only words on her laptop screen were “Life and Death,” followed by the date, followed by a single question: “Are all lives equally good?”

  Megan had enrolled in this seminar because the catalog description had piqued her curiosity: “Is life inherently worthwhile, or only if the life lived is a good life? Is death necessarily negative? Is a life not lived superior to a life lived in vain?”

  Megan was no philosophy major—she would declare biology next year, and her curriculum was designed specifically for premed. But that course description had grabbed her attention. She figured that it could only serve the medical profession well if a future doctor took the time to contemplate the larger meaning of life and death in addition to learning the science that could extend one and forestall the other.

  She should have foreseen, though, that a philosophy seminar with no prerequisites would devolve into a series of free-floating chat sessions during which unfocused undergrads—the ones who would eventually wind up behind a Starbucks counter, or perhaps in law school—attempted to show off their mastery of the most reductionist versions of the various branches of philosophy.

  Today’s class, as was often the case, had held momentary promise when Dr. Stein posed the question that was still staring at Megan from the screen of her laptop: “Are all lives equally good?”

  Unfortunately, the first student to respond immediately played the Hitler card. As in, “Of course not. I mean, who here mourns the death of Hitler?” After just three weeks of a single philosophy course, Megan was convinced that the quality of the national civic dialogue would be noticeably improved by a voluntary prohibition against all analogies to Nazi Germany.

  Poor Dr. Stein had done her best to steer the conversation on track, but then the girl who always wore overalls and patchouli oil had set off another frenzy of mental masturbation by wondering aloud whether the mentally disabled enjoyed their lives as much as “regular” people.

  Megan found herself contemplating her fingers jiggling on the keyboard again. Not her fingers as much as the keyboard itself. The layout. She understood why the Q and the Z belonged to the whim of her left pinky; Hitler analogies were more common than the use of those letters. But what criteria had been used to determine the keys that would qualify for “home base,” as her mother had called it during her early touch-typing training? A, S, D, L—those she understood. But F and J? And the semicolon? How often did anyone use semicolons?

  She forced herself to tune back into the conversation around the seminar table. She gathered that the patchouli girl’s comment about the mentally disabled had set off a larger conversation about the value of knowledge when a guy with a paperboy hat and a beatnik soul patch retorted, “Please, go read more Ayn Rand. You’re asked about lives without value, and you pick on the retarded? Of much more questionable value is a life spent absorbing knowledge but then doing absolutely nothing with it.”

  At that, Megan thought she noticed a twitch in Dr. Stein’s left eye. Twenty minutes later, the class was still debating whether knowledge was worthy for its own sake, or merely as a means toward practical ends.

  “But even to differentiate between knowledge for its own sake and for its pragmatic import is a fiction,” the patchouli woman insisted. “It assumes an objective reality that stands alone, independent of our own cognitive responses to it. We have no measure of reality other than through our own thoughts, so what precisely do you mean when you say ‘knowledge standing alone’? Knowledge is reality.”

  “Only if you’re an epistemological idealist,” the soul patch argued. “Maybe Kant would agree with that kind of logic, or even John Locke. But a realist would maintain that there is an ontological reality that is independent of our own experiences. And if we can set aside our narcissism for thirty seconds and accept that premise, then it’s not a lot to ask of the privileged elite that they use their knowledge to make a concrete, objective difference in that reality.”

  “This might be slightly off topic—”

  Megan felt her eyes rolling involuntarily away from the speaker, the decent-looking guy who always wore concert T-shirts.

  “This might be slightly off topic, but has anyone else wondered why John Locke on Lost is named John Locke? It explains the inconsistencies in the various narratives. The writers are telling us to take all those flashbacks and flash-forwards with a grain of salt; they are each filtered through the lens of the characters’ personal experiences.”

  “Oh, my God. Did he really just say that?” The whisper came from the student sitting next to Megan, a guy in a Philadelphia Flyers jersey with a serious case of bed head. “I should have saved my trust fund and gone to Penn.”

  “Okay, people, time out.” Stein rapped her knuckles against the tabletop to call the class to order. “Let’s get back to the original question.”

  Megan wished she had a dollar for every time Dr. Stein had taken them “back to the original question.” The woman no doubt knew her shit, but she had to stop treating these morons as intellectual equals. If this group could be trusted with the amount of guidance provided by the original question, they wouldn’t be talking about Hitler, the mentally disabled, and a television show about island castaways.

  She finally caved to temptation and opened Internet Explorer on her laptop. Almost all of the university’s buildings were equipped with wireless Internet access, but a serious professor like Dr. Stein certainly expected her students to refrain from partaking during class time. Barely veiled surfing ran rampant, however, and to Megan it was no surprise. The university’s current regime was, in her view, no different from cutting lines of cocaine on the desktop in front of addicts and telling them not to snort.

  She moved her right hand onto the laptop’s mouse pad and checked her Gmail account while making a point of periodically looking up from her screen to deliver a pensive nod. From there, it was on to Perez Hilton’s site for the celebrity gossip. Then to Facebook, where it was her
turn in the Scrabble game she was playing with Courtney. She knew that at some point Courtney’s decision not to attend NYU would cut back on their socializing, but for now they remained in daily online contact.

  Megan noticed that her neighbor with the bed head was eyeballing her computer screen. She was about to deliver her best warning glare when he nudged his notebook an inch in her direction.

  Beneath a series of doodled boxes and circles, he had jotted, “You missed HAYSEED for a bingo.”

  She turned to her game and confirmed the mistake. Switching the laptop back to her blank class notes, she typed a sad face—a colon, followed by a dash and a left parenthesis.

  Her neighbor scribbled another note: “campusjuice.com.”

  Megan clicked back to her browser, typed the Web site name into the address bar, and gently hit the enter key. “Campus Juice.” White bubble letters against an orange background, followed by a slogan that said it all: “All the Juice, Always Anonymous.”

  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