212

by Alafair Burke

  “Seriously, I’ve got to defend Rogan here. He paid his dues.”

  Tucker was unamused. “So what’s the next move?”

  “Rogan and I were thinking we’d take another look at Sparks.” She set out her theory that Sparks’s resistance to their investigation could have more to do with his role in Mancini’s death than any concern for privacy.

  “For what it’s worth, I told Dillon we wouldn’t be giving his boss special treatment.”

  “So we’re a go?” Ellie asked.

  She nodded. “But I also told him you’d continue to work every angle. Don’t just focus on Sparks. And I don’t want to hear from anyone in the house that you’re shucking off new cases, either. We stopped pushing full-time on this two months ago.”

  “We know.”

  “And watch your back, Hatcher. You already spent one night in jail. I’d hate to see what Sam Sparks could do if he was really pissed off.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  3:00 P.M.

  Megan Gunther stood in the lobby of the Sixth Precinct, fighting back the tears that were pooling in her eyes and threatening to roll down her reddened cheeks.

  “What do you mean, there’s nothing you can do?”

  She had never seen her father like this. Jonas Gunther was an insurance man. That wasn’t to say he was weak—quite the opposite, in fact. He was a man of principle, who valued character above all else. At work, he expected others to live up to their word. In his personal life, he expected people to do what was right. And he did not hesitate to stand up to those who failed to deliver on his expectations.

  But Megan’s father, however forceful he could be about making a point, was always in control. Strong, but subdued. Emotions, he would tell her, got in the way of an effective argument.

  Today, though, Jonas Gunther was emotional.

  Megan’s mother, Patricia, placed a comforting arm around her daughter’s shoulder and gave her a squeeze. She stroked her straight blond hair and told her that everything would be all right.

  “We don’t know everything will be all right, Patty. That’s why we’re here. Things don’t become all right just because we hope for them to be. They become all right when the men and women who have sworn to protect and serve us pay attention when someone is threatening another citizen.”

  Megan noticed a woman and her young son seated on a bench on the other side of the lobby watching them, alarm registered on their faces. The child dropped his gaze and burrowed his cheeks against his mother’s abdomen.

  “Mr. Gunther, I understand your frustration, but I need you to lower your voice right now.”

  According to the metal nameplate affixed to his uniform, the desk sergeant trying to calm Megan’s father was called Martinez. His words did nothing to mitigate Jonas’s anger.

  “When I told my daughter to call the police two and a half hours ago, I expected an officer to go to her apartment to start an investigation. Then she tells me she’s required to come into the precinct, so her mother and I drove into the city from New Jersey, expecting something to be done about this. My daughter has done everything one could ask of her. She missed a biochem lab today. She found each and every mention of her name on this disgusting Web site. She printed out copies for you.” He shook the quarter-inch stack of paper for emphasis. “And now you tell us there’s nothing you can do to protect her?”

  “Sir, I’ve tried to explain, we have received more than our fair share of calls in this precinct from other NYU students, all complaining about what people are saying about them on this very Web site. And we’ve run our options past the district attorney’s office, and the same problems are going to apply here. First of all, the site doesn’t require users to give a name, address—anything. It’s totally anonymous.”

  Jonas was already shaking his head. “That’s not true, that’s not true. I called the IT person at my company, and they tell me there are options. There’s a way to track—you can track the IQ or something like that. What’s it called again, honey?”

  “IP address, Dad.”

  “Yes,” he said, pointing to Sergeant Martinez. “The Web site should have that information. You can use it to—”

  “And that’s the second problem, sir. This company is not willing to release that information without a subpoena—”

  “So go get a fucking subpoena.”

  Megan flinched. Except for the time her cousin had head-butted her father with his first catcher’s helmet, she couldn’t remember ever hearing her dad use the F word.

  “Let the man talk, Jonas. Please.”

  Megan’s father set his jaw. He was clearly angry, but at least he was being quiet. For now. Sergeant Martinez gave Patricia Gunther an appreciative glance.

  “We can only get a subpoena if we have cause. And, as difficult as I’m sure it is for your daughter—for you, Megan—to read something like this on the Internet, the posts are not directly threatening.”

  “But my schedule. Someone’s watching me.”

  “You said yourself that everyone who knows you knows your class schedule and your workout routine. Unfortunately, messing with someone’s head isn’t a crime. If you’ve had any disputes with anyone lately—a former friend, a boy—”

  “There are no disputes, Officer.” Jonas was interrupting again. “My daughter has no idea who would do something like this. You have to listen to us.”

  “That’s true, sir, and I have. I have listened now for more than twenty-five minutes. And I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do for you today. If it’s of any consolation, you might want to take a closer look at the other stuff on that site. A whole bunch of it is even worse than what your daughter’s going through.” He looked directly at Megan. “You can’t let this get to you.”

  “You can’t just make us leave,” her father said. “You must—”

  With just the placement of her hand on her husband’s forearm, Patricia Gunther silenced him. “Do you have a daughter, Sergeant Martinez?”

  Martinez cleared his throat and then looked Megan’s mother in the eye. “I do, ma’am. She’s fifteen years old. So pretty, it scares me. And if you ask me as a father, I’d say the scumbags who run this Web site should all find Molotov cocktails in their cars tomorrow morning. But if you ask me as the desk sergeant of the Sixth Precinct, there’s nothing more I can do for you folks. I’m sorry.”

  As Megan led the way out of the precinct, she reread the final page she had printed about herself from campusjuice.com. She had printed not just the original posts, but also the comments that had been posted by other users in reply:

  POST

  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

  Megan Gunther, someone is watching

  COMMENTS:

  Seriously, Dude, what is up with you? I’m in Math 210 with her and she’s not even hot. Go have your rape fantasies on someone else.

  Both the original comment and the reply were obviously posted by a couple of virgins who need to get a life, and some respect for womyn.

  Got stalk? Yo, this site is whack.

  Not to kill the party, but does this chick know about this? Maybe someone should notify campus security? Looks odd to me…

  REPLY TO COMMENTS:

  Good luck with security. You’re all anonymous, and so am I. They’ll never find me.

  And neither will Megan.

  As Megan left the overhead fluorescent lights of the Sixth Precinct and stepped into the gray overcast of West Tenth Street, she stopped fighting the wave of emotion that had been building in her since she had first spotted her name on that vile Web site. She did not try to choke back the sob in her chest. She let the tears begin to roll.

  CHAPTER TEN

  3:15 P.M.

  Katie Battle rang the doorbell first, just to be safe, and then slipped the key into the lock. She enjoyed a mental sigh of relief when she f
elt the familiar tumble of the interior pins. She couldn’t count the number of times she had schlepped a client to a showing, only to learn that the seller had left the wrong keys with the doorman.

  “Hello?” she called out through the cracked door. Another annoyance avoided; the sellers were out of the apartment, as promised. “So this one’s just over eleven hundred square feet, which means you could easily convert it to a two-bedroom.”

  Her clients today were Don and Laura Jenning, who were looking to purchase their first New York City apartment. Some clients came to Katie with a sophisticated understanding of the market, formed through countless hours perusing the New York Times real estate section and the plethora of Web sites devoted exclusively to property listings.

  The Jennings were not that type of client.

  “Wow,” Laura said. “This is so much nicer than the other ones.”

  “I wanted you to see it, just to give you an idea of the difference it can make if you’re willing to stretch.”

  Katie, of course, was not surprised that the apartment—a large one-bedroom condo just off of Madison Park—was more impressive than the six other properties she had already shown the Jennings earlier in the day. After all, the entire purpose of this day’s viewing tour was to lead them to this apartment. Today was what Katie called a We Can Do It tour.

  Like many of her clients, the Jennings had leaped into the fluctuating New York City real estate market with unformed and unrealistic expectations. “We don’t really know what neighborhood we want to be in: downtown ideally, but the Upper West Side’s fine, too, or even the Upper East.” Already, that first sentence from Laura had been a giveaway. To a person who considers downtown her “ideal,” the Upper East Side is definitely not fine. Either Laura didn’t know Manhattan—unlikely, given she’d been renting in Chelsea for six years—or she just wasn’t being honest about her preferences.

  And then there was the budget. “We want to stay under 700. We’d love to get a two-bedroom, but know we may have to get by with a one-bedroom-plus to start.”

  It was a so-called compromise that Katie heard all the time. The reality, though, was that a true “one-bedroom-plus”—a one-bedroom with a separate space for an office or a crib—was the same square footage (and price) as a small two-bedroom. And neither could be had for anywhere near seven hundred thousand dollars, no matter what people heard about so-called bargains in the down market.

  If Katie believed the Jennings’ budget cap to be real, she would not have wasted her time on a We Can Do It tour. She instead would have arranged a Come to Jesus tour. In a Come to Jesus tour, Katie would drag a couple like the Jennings to six nice (and, ideally, overpriced) two-bedroom apartments. When the clients finally realized they could not afford apartments of that size, she would lead them to a nice, reasonably priced one-bedroom. It would be time for the clients to Come to Jesus: either get into the market with a small place or rent for the rest of their lives.

  But the Jennings didn’t need a Come to Jesus tour. They needed the We Can Do It tour, designed not to persuade the clients of what they could not afford, but instead to convince them of what they could afford.

  Katie knew from the Jennings’ mortgage application that quiet, petite Don pulled in a quarter mil a year as a “director of credit risk policy,” whatever that was. Since shacking up with Laura, he was living month to month, but in the decade before he’d met her, he’d managed to save an entire year’s salary. Laura was a jewelry designer who sold her wares at open fairs and to a few small boutiques. Lucky, lucky Laura—whom Katie tried not to resent—had never made more than twenty thousand in any individual year from her craft, but had her father—and now, Don—to fall back on.

  The Jennings could afford more than they knew. They just had to put away their existing notions of a dollar and to start thinking, We can do it.

  Katie knew that this generously sized one-bedroom would be a good candidate for convincing the Jennings to “stretch,” as she liked to say, but the apartment was even more impressive than she had imagined. The seller had followed all of the rules: clean surfaces, no unnecessary clutter, even the welcoming fragrance of a warm pan of brownies, still cooling on the stovetop. And absolutely no photographs; the apartment should feel like it already belongs to the potential buyers.

  “Now this one’s one-point-one-two-five,” Katie said, as if the extra four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars was chump change, “but my guess is that there’s some softness there.”

  Don winced at the number, but his wife did not. “Wow, Don, look at this kitchen. We could actually cook if we had this kind of kitchen. Think of the money we’d save in the long run.”

  And then Katie knew she had an ally. Crossing the million-dollar threshold would be a leap for Don, but now Katie could see that Laura had been there all along. She felt a twinge of animosity toward the woman for so willingly spending her husband’s hard-earned money, but then reminded herself that she needed the commission. Given Katie’s standing in the hierarchy of her agency, it wasn’t often she had a shot at selling above the million-dollar mark.

  “Feel free to open the cabinets,” Katie urged. “They’re Italian. High-gloss lacquer, top of the line.”

  Katie checked her BlackBerry while the Jennings made their way through the apartment. She preferred to give buyers privacy so they could imagine life in their new apartment, without the watchful eye of a broker, but last year a couple posing as buyers made off with a hundred thousand dollars of jewelry and collectibles at various open houses across Manhattan. Now Katie kept one eye on her clients, even while she read her e-mail.

  She could have used some good news. Instead, the incoming messages brought her more headaches with no corresponding revenue. The purchaser of a Tribeca studio under contract was bickering over a hundred-dollar difference in the negotiations over a built-in wall unit. Katie used her thumbs to type her most comforting words, even as she rolled her eyes in frustration.

  Another e-mail delivered far worse news on the business front: a client who had been on the fence about making an offer for a West Village one-bedroom had climbed down on the wrong side. That he delivered the news to her electronically was not a good sign. On the phone, she had a chance of persuading him otherwise, or at least lining up the next showings. A terse e-mail like this one told her that the guy had written off not only this particular apartment, but his commitment to purchasing anything at all.

  The message she received from Marj Mason, a caretaker at Glen Forrest Communities, was even more upsetting. Katie had seen the assisted living center’s telephone number pop up on her vibrating BlackBerry as she had stepped into the elevator with the Jennings. As Katie had requested a few months earlier, Marj had followed up with an e-mail. It was easier for her to check written messages than voice mails when she was with clients.

  Katie’s mother had fallen again. According to Marj, there were no breaks this time—only bruises, and of course even more fear now of walking on her own. There was no way around it: Katie was going to have to increase the intensity of her mother’s care.

  And then there was the final message: a text message that Katie had noticed first on her BlackBerry, but read last. She felt a knot form in her stomach as she took in the abrupt instructions.

  As she replaced her BlackBerry in her red Coach purse, she prayed her mother would never find out about that final message, or what Katie would be doing the following night because of it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  3:45 P.M.

  Rogan was waiting for Ellie at his desk when she emerged from the locker room, freshly showered, hair still damp.

  “We cool with the Lou?”

  “Icy. Did you get hold of our guy in Narcotics?”

  “Yep. He wasn’t real happy about sticking around for a five o’clock arrival. I told him we’d do our best.”

  Ellie looked at her watch. It was nearing four. “Our best will be five o’clock.”

  “Are you going to bother tel
ling me why?”

  “We’ll have to work our way through traffic going uptown.”

  “Uptown? The Fifth Precinct’s in Chinatown.”

  “We’re making a pit stop. You’ll see.”

  Twenty minutes later, Rogan peered through a glass storefront window on Eighty-ninth and Madison and flinched.

  “Is that woman doing what I think she’s doing?”

  “Um, that would depend on what exactly your imagination might be doing with the input being processed by your visual cortex.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I think if my brain’s doing anything, it’s trying to forget what I just saw. That shit should be illegal.”

  “It’s called threading,” Ellie said.

  They watched as an Indian woman with smooth dark skin and burgundy-stained lips moved her head back and forth, using the grip of her teeth and the movement of her head to maneuver a thread across the face of a young blond woman seated on the other side of the glass window.

  “She’s using a thread to pull that woman’s eyebrows out?”

  “It’s called threading,” Ellie repeated.

  “Should be called torture. What the fuck are we doing here?”

  “You could use a little tidying up around there,” Ellie said, reaching for his brow line.

  Rogan swatted her hand away.

  “This is Perfect Arches,” she said. “It’s Thursday, ten after four. You don’t remember?”

  “If you’ve some personal woman business to take care of, Hatcher, you really didn’t need to drag me along.”