“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.
“‘What if Sparks did it?’” Rogan asked Ellie in a hushed voice. “How about, what in the big bad fuck were you thinking?”
What if Sparks did it? It had been a little more than twenty-four hours since Judge Paul Bandon read those words in Ellie’s notebook. She had scribbled them next to a cartoon drawing of a stick figure with stubbly hair and a striped jumpsuit, standing behind prison bars.
“Apparently I was thinking that we’d been too quick to give Sparks a pass.” She removed her tiny gold hoop earrings from the plastic bag and began looping them through her lobes.
Rogan held the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “Like jewelry’s gonna do anything for you looking like that.”
Partners were like families that way: the booking clerk had best keep his mouth shut, but for Rogan, the subject of her incarceration was fair game.
Ellie had been replaying the scene in the courtroom for twenty-four hours, and she still couldn’t believe Bandon had pulled the trigger on her. She was convinced that until that moment—when Bandon had said, “Your notes please, Detective Hatcher”—she hadn’t even been aware of the words and images that were forming in her scribbles.
Her mistake had been trying to persuade Bandon of that fact. If she had simply admitted to carrying vague suspicions that she hadn’t disclosed on the stand, she probably would have gotten off with a lecture.
But instead Ellie had tried to explain. And Bandon, instead of understanding, had accused her of being “cute.” And then when she argued even more insistently, as Max tried to quiet her down, Bandon had concluded that she was lying. To him. Personally. And that, no judge would tolerate.
And now because Bandon thought she was a liar, she had spent the night in a holding cell.
“No bo-hunk boyfriend to bail you out?” Rogan asked.
“You didn’t bail me out. I was released after fully serving my twenty-four-hour sentence.”
“Whatever. Where’s your man, Max?”
“I didn’t want to chance Bandon finding out about us. I’m obviously on his shit list now. No need to add Max to that picture. Besides, you’re the one who insisted on picking me up. I could’ve gotten back to the precinct on my own.”
“What? And miss the opportunity of you doing the walk of shame in your jelly slippers?”
Ellie looked down at her black leather flats, happy to have her own shoes back. “Please tell me that smell in my nostrils is just the memory of my overnight sojourn at the lovely Centre Street inn.”
“Sorry, chica. I’m afraid you absorbed the permeating funk of your surrounding atmosphere.”
“I’m so happy that my personal and professional misery has brought you such happiness.”
“So are you going to explain those notes that landed you in this shit pile?”
“My mind was wandering in court. We both get some of our best ideas when we aren’t even trying.”
“Are you forgetting that we looked real close at him early on? Real close.” Rogan’s arms were crossed, fingertips tucked beneath his underarms. Always well dressed, today Rogan wore a black wool suit, a crisp lavender dress shirt, and an Hermès tie worth more than Ellie’s entire outfit. He might have a cop’s blue-collar values, but, thanks to a grandmother who married well late in life, he could live beyond a cop’s salary.
“Look, you mind if we talk about this in a slightly less depressing environment?”
Ellie led the way out of the holding floor onto the street, and Rogan didn’t stop her. By the time they reached the fleet car that Rogan had parked on Centre Street, she was ready to talk.
“So we took a look at Sparks and cleared him.”
Rogan glanced back at the building from which they had just exited. “Pretty sure I was the one saying that back there a couple of minutes ago.”
“Keys.” She held up her right hand for the catch. In the six-plus months they’d been partners in the homicide task force of the Manhattan South Detective Borough, Ellie was usually happy to leave the driving to Rogan, but after the last twenty-four hours, she wanted control over her own movements. Rogan obliged, tossing the keys across the hood.
“We’ve had this case four months now,” she said, turning over the ignition as Rogan climbed into the passenger’s seat. “We checked out the obvious angles first: sex and money.”
A guy gets filled with bullets after leaving his semen inside a knotted condom on the nightstand, and the first theory is sex. But when it came to sex, everyone who knew Robert Mancini said he was uncomplicated. Thirty years old. Unmarried since a starter marriage to a high school sweetheart had ended eight years earlier. No children. If he had a girlfriend—and he didn’t at the time of his death—he was with that woman, and that woman only. If he didn’t have a girlfriend, he hooked up and made it clear that hooking up was all he was interested in. Apparently there was no shortage of women willing to play by those ground rules.
Unfortunately, they’d been unable to locate the woman who played the game that particular night. The 212’s overnight doorman had no memory of either her or Mancini, and had since been fired for routinely leaving his post to play video games with the teenage son of a tenant. Without a video recorder, the building’s monitoring system was useless, and Mancini’s phone records and e-mail messages had also led nowhere.
Then there was money. But again, with money, the picture seemed equally uncomplicated. Mancini had been working at Sparks Industries for almost a year before his death. Prior to that, he’d served in the U.S. Army, where he met a private contract worker named Nick Dillon in Afghanistan. When Dillon hung up the Middle Eastern travel and became the head of the corporate security division of Sparks Industries, he offered Mancini a job back home, which Mancini accepted as soon as his military commitment was up. His salary was in the low one hundreds, a figure that Rogan and Ellie had confirmed as the going rate for a decent corporate security gig.
He owned a two-bedroom condo in Hoboken, only two and a half miles from the childhood home where his sister’s family still lived. He was up to date on a moderate mortgage. He had no unusual debts, no irregularities in his bank records.
“Sex and money didn’t get us shit,” Rogan said. “And when sex and money and gambling didn’t get us shit, we took a close look at Sam Sparks and cleared him. I think that’s now the third time we’ve agreed on that.”
But the notes Ellie had scribbled during the motion hearing were asking them to revisit that determination. And Rogan wanted to know why.
As she drove up Centre Street, Ellie hit the wigwag lights on the dash to cut through the standstill traffic that was blocking the intersection at Canal through Chinatown.
“We looked at Sparks before he decided to stonewall us. Now that we know just how much he wants to be off our radar, we have to look at him again.”
“Holy crap, Hatcher. Rogan told us you got into some shit at the courthouse, but we didn’t think he meant literally.”
John Shannon was a portly detective with light blond hair and ruddy skin. He sat directly behind Ellie in the squad room and had a bottle-a-week Old Spice habit.
“I got two hours of sleep on a mattress thinner than the layer of fat around your neck, Shannon; haven’t eaten since I bit into the mystery meat burger they handed me for dinner; and spent the last twenty-four hours in city-issued underwear approximating the consistency of eighty-grit sandpaper—”
“And she’s still better looking than anyone you ever dated, Shannon,” Rogan interjected.
“I’m just saying, cut me some frickin’ slack.”
Rogan draped his suit jacket on the back of his chair. As he took a seat at the gray metal desk that faced Ellie’s, he threw Shannon a look that sent the detective’s attention back to his own work.
“Just b
ecause the man’s stonewalling us doesn’t mean he’s our guy.” Rogan reached for a tin of Altoids on his desk and popped a mint in his mouth. “Rich assholes shit on us all the time. They usually aren’t murderers. You don’t think this has something to do with Bandon throwing you in the clink?”
She gave him her middle finger and her friendliest smile. “Did I say anything about investigating Bandon? I’m talking about Sparks. All we wanted was a closer look at his financials. Just a way to check on his enemies. Why go to court over something like that?”
“Donovan said going into it that we were probably going to lose. We didn’t have PC.”
She opened her top desk drawer and removed a jar of Nutella. She’d long ago given up offering any to Rogan. “So?” she asked. “Most innocent people cooperate with us even when we don’t have squat.”
“Like I said, not the assholes.”
“No, but even the jerks usually have a reason. I was sitting in the courtroom watching Guerrero bill four hundred dollars an hour to fight us. Sparks even showed up personally, and his time’s got to be worth way more than Guerrero’s. Why?”
Ellie’s father had always told her that the key to good police work was to scrutinize people’s motives. “Find the motive,” he used to say, “and the motive will lead you to the man.”
She understood why the innocent citizens of Bushwick didn’t cooperate when some Trinitarios took out another banger. In a neighborhood run by gangs, a conversation with the police could be followed by a knock on the door in the middle of the night by a machete-wielding messenger. She even understood when some corporate bureaucrat wouldn’t open the company records without a warrant. Regular people had jobs to protect.
But Sparks wasn’t a regular person. He was the boss. He was a billionaire. This was his call, and he’d made the wrong one.
Rogan leaned his weight back in his chair and rested his palms on top of his closely shaved scalp. “Sparks showed up personally, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Shit,” he said, letting his weight bring his chair back to the floor. He pointed a finger at her across the desk. “You know I never liked Sparks for it.”
From the very beginning, Rogan had firmly believed that a man as savvy as Sam Sparks wouldn’t eliminate a threat inside an apartment he owned. She, however, had believed it was just the kind of reverse psychology that someone as arrogant as Sparks would employ. Me? But why would I draw attention to myself by having the man killed inside my own apartment?
“J. J., you know as well as I do how quickly we eliminated him as a suspect. All that mattered to us was the time line, the call records, and the personal assistant.” The same assistant was in charge of both Sparks’s personal calendar and the schedule for the 212. According to her, Mancini hadn’t asked to use the apartment until 2:30 on the day of the murder, and she had never mentioned it to Sparks. She insisted that Sparks could not have known that Mancini would be at the apartment that night.
And because they had scratched Sparks from the list of possible suspects, they had never scratched beneath the surface of Sparks’s public persona to unearth whatever secrets Mancini could have stumbled on.
“You win,” Rogan said. “We look at Sparks again.”
Ellie smiled as she took another bite of Nutella.
“You go tell the Lou, though. She was on the warpath yesterday.”
“At me or Bandon?”
“A little of both. A lot of both, actually. She’ll want to know you’re back.”
“Yeah, okay.”
She started toward her lieutenant’s office, but then turned again to face Rogan. “Do me a favor?”
“Burn those clothes you’re wearing?”
“Track down that guy we talked to in May at Narcotics. Tell him to expect us at about”—she looked at her watch and calculated the time she’d need for another stop—“five o’clock.”
“Any hint as to why?”
“In court, Sparks’s lawyer claimed we’ve got an investigation running on the apartment next door.”
“And how would he know that?”
“We figure that out after we see if he’s right.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
3:00 P.M.
Ellie rapped her knuckles against the glass window that separated Lieutenant Robin Tucker’s office from the cramped detective squad, packed as it was with unmatched desks, dilapidated chairs, and the chaos of eighteen homicide detectives working out of a single room. She swept her bangs to the side as she watched through the glass. Tucker’s head tilted ever so slightly toward her office door.
“It’s open,” she called out, still reading whatever report she held between her fingertips.
“Afternoon, Lou. Rogan says you wanted to touch base?”
Tucker set the document down on her desk. “Did you really need your partner to tell you that, given what happened in court yesterday?”
Ellie had finally won over her former lieutenant three short months before he was demoted due to an internal affairs investigation, the details of which were still wholly unknown and therefore rampant fodder for the NYPD rumor mill. When she found out that her new lieutenant was called Robin Tucker, she had assumed that the gender-ambiguous name belonged to a man. Statistical odds. But when Ellie learned that this particular Robin was of the female variety, she was optimistic. Maybe her luck would be better with a woman as a supervisor. Unfortunately, though, Ellie’s problems were with authority, not men.
“No, Lou. Just making sure Rogan got credit for keeping me in check.”
“If you were in check, you might not have spent the night in jail for contempt of court.”
Ellie pressed her lips together. Explanations had done nothing to help her with Judge Bandon. She wasn’t going to waste her breath attempting to persuade Tucker that the judge had overreacted.
Tucker looked Ellie in the eye during the silence. Ellie knew from asking around that her lieutenant was forty-eight years old, but her makeup-less skin was clear and bright. Her wavy hair had probably been shiny and blond years before turning to its current wiry mix of gray and light brown.
She gave Ellie a nod. “Actually, a little bird already told me that the judge teed off on you for no good reason.”
Ellie shut her eyes and thought about the ribbing she was going to get in the house if Max called her lieutenant in an attempt to protect her. Then as quickly as the idea had come to her, she rejected it. Max knew better.
“You know Nick Dillon.” The way Ellie said it, it wasn’t a question. As an ex-cop, the head of Sparks Industries’ Corporate Security Division would know more than a few former colleagues at the NYPD.
“We were both in the Seventh when I was just a rookie. He called this morning looking for your Lou. I guess he wanted to save you from a month’s worth of desk duty. Anyway, we recognized each other’s names from back in the day.”
Tucker’s affect changed as she spoke about Dillon—her eyes softened, the corners of her lips raised into a slight smile—and Ellie noticed for the first time that with a little effort her lieutenant could be attractive.
“He’s been pretty decent to Rogan and me.”
“He’s a good guy. When he called, he gave me a heads-up that Sparks may go back to court to get access to our evidence.”
“On what basis?”
“Given where you spent the last twenty-four hours, do you really think Sam Sparks considers himself bound by the usual rules?”
“Valid point.” A week earlier, Ellie had read online that Sparks was in negotiations for a reality show in which contestants would show off their eye for potential real estate jackpots. Sparks would supervise their work, like Donald Trump on The Apprentice, but meaner and with better hair.
“Dillon knows it’s futile. No court will give Sparks what he wants, no matter how much he pays his lawyers to go through the motions.”
“But Dillon does know you from back at the Seventh.”
“Exactly. A guy like Dillon doesn’t chat
up someone like me just for shits and giggles. Someone who looked like you? Now that would be different.”
Ellie was used to her fellow cops making remarks about her looks. She would probably always look a little bit like the girl who was once the runner-up in the Junior Miss Wichita pageant. But what she usually chose to take as a compliment sounded like a dig coming from Tucker.
“So Dillon was sniffing around to see what he might turn up?” she asked.
“Yeah, I actually felt sorry for the guy. You can tell he thinks Sparks is a schmuck. I guess Sparks wants everything we know about the missing girl. He figures that if he can find her, we’ll work that angle and forget about him.”
“That’s a dead end. We’ve got the latents from the champagne flute and the DNA on the outside of the condom, but no hits on either one. She’s a mystery woman.”
Ellie hadn’t been particularly surprised. In a criminal justice system dominated by male perpetrators, and with a DNA database consisting almost entirely of sex offenders, striking a hit on a female subject was rare.
“I guess when you’ve got enough money, the sky’s the limit,” Tucker said. “He wants Dillon to work the case from beginning to end with his own people. You know, Dillon spent ten years between homicide and special victims before he went private. I got the impression the work in the private sector was pretty high-speed—corporate kidnapping prevention. He’s a good cop.”
“Except he’s not a cop. He’s been a ten with me and Rogan, but he’s still a guy making four times what you’re pulling in, doing half the amount of work, for some rich prick who thinks he’s entitled to more safety than regular people.”
“Tell me how you really feel, Detective.”
“I just did. Because for a second there it actually sounded like you wanted us to share our evidence with Sam Sparks.”
“No, I don’t. I was, however, suggesting that a cop with those kinds of years under his belt might catch the sort of details that a less experienced detective—someone who got promoted too early, someone who was the brass’s darling—might miss.”
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