212

by Alafair Burke

  As impossible as it seemed, she was trying to follow Courtney’s advice to ignore the Web site altogether. She and Courtney had practically grown up together in New Jersey. When they had both accepted college admissions in the city—Courtney at Columbia, Megan at NYU—they had celebrated the fact that going off to school was not going to separate them. But now they were sophomores, and the reality was that the six miles between Courtney’s Morningside Heights apartment and Megan’s Greenwich Village place may as well have been a train ride between Chicago and Philly. Between classes, homework, and making new friends at their respective schools, they were lucky to see each other once a month.

  But Courtney had dropped everything when Megan had called her yesterday. And Courtney had proved more helpful than either Megan’s parents or the police. Courtney was a volunteer at a domestic violence hotline and had some experience dealing with stalking—or at least its victims.

  According to Courtney, Megan would be best off ignoring what had been written about her on the Web site. They were merely words in cyberspace. The first post she’d found went back three weeks, and until she came across her name two days ago, the words had sat online—stagnant, black and white, incapable of harming her. She simply needed to erase the problem from her mind—forget she’d ever seen the posts, and force herself to go back to normal.

  Easier said than done.

  She kept replaying Sergeant Martinez’s words in her mind. Messing with someone’s head isn’t a crime…. There’s a whole bunch on there that’s way worse…. You can’t let this get to you.

  She reminded herself that there were thousands of posts on that Web site, millions if one were to count all of the many anonymous chatboards and blog comments that were on the Internet overall. She couldn’t let a couple of sentences—among all of that garbage—get to her.

  Still, instead of learning more about how the molecules of life were synthesized, she found herself running through a host of possible suspects. Her father had immediately brushed off the sergeant’s suggestion that Megan might know the author of the notes. That’s the kind of father he was, the kind of father who instinctively leaped to his daughter’s defense. Of course he had sought to protect Megan against the notion that she might have made herself an enemy. Of course he hadn’t stopped to wonder.

  But he had reacted so quickly that Megan hadn’t stopped to wonder, either. Even standing for half an hour in the precinct, she had never paused to really think through the question of who might be in a position—or have a motive—to “mess with her head,” as Sergeant Martinez had said. Or, as Courtney had put it more bluntly, “pull a mind-fuck on her.”

  There was that guy outside their apartment last month. He was at the bus stop when she ducked inside Jamba Juice. She initially noticed him because he was cute, but by the time she had her Mango Mantra, the 3 bus had come and gone without him. Instead, he stood at the entrance of her building, and as she approached, she could have sworn that he’d been reading the list of names posted at the entrance, his finger resting close to her buzzer. She’d blown it off once the lobby door shut securely behind her, but now she wondered if there was some possibility she’d seen him before on campus.

  As hard as she tried to remember that man’s face, her mind kept pulling up another image. Keith.

  They were still together when she picked her fall classes, so Keith knew her schedule. Keith would know how much something like this would distract her from school. Keith was addicted to the Internet. He would know about a site like Campus Juice, and he would know that the site provided anonymity. And Keith could be vindictive when he set his mind to it.

  But they had broken up back in June, and the online posts didn’t start until the beginning of September. Would he really stew for almost three months before carrying out a full-on assault of terror against her that continued to this day? It was hard to imagine.

  But as she wrapped her necklace—the thin silver chain dangling the heart pendant that Keith had given her—around the tip of her right index finger, she couldn’t help but wonder.

  Over the quiet distraction of the background music flowing through her headphones, she heard the clang of a pan against the electric stovetop in the kitchen. Heather had emerged from her cave for a feeding.

  Megan had hoped that the one upside to getting a roommate would be a new friendship, a girlfriend to talk to late at night. And when Heather first moved in, she wasn’t particularly cold. In those initial weeks, she joined Megan in the living room for a couple of episodes of Project Runway, one of the only shows Megan ever made time for. They also formed a habit of piggybacking their takeout orders so they could share dinner at the table.

  Then one night in June, after Heather caught Megan crying in her room after officially calling it quits with Keith, Heather had actually opened up to her. She said she’d gone through some rough times—a boyfriend, someone older, someone who really fucked with her head. She said she was pretty screwed up until she went through counseling for it, and now she was getting a fresh start. But then Megan had made the mistake of asking her what had happened between her and the guy to make it so bad, and all of a sudden, Heather was gone. She had a paper to write or something, excused herself from Megan’s room, and never mentioned the conversation—or any other one, for that matter—again. She was just a tenant renting a room.

  Then, yesterday, when she got home from the police station, for just a second, Megan had felt something like a bond again when Heather noticed how upset she was and asked what was wrong. But when Megan told her about the Web site, all Heather had said was, “Wow, I’m sorry to hear that. That must be really stressful.”

  Megan supposed it was a polite enough response. But it wasn’t the kind of thing a real friend would say. Courtney had spent nearly an hour with her on the phone yesterday, helping her pull herself together and put the entire situation into context. “The big picture,” Courtney kept saying.

  Then later, when Megan was hanging her coat in the closet outside Heather’s room, she heard Heather on the phone saying something about “threats” on a Web site. She hadn’t asked Heather to keep it a secret. And she probably should have expected Heather to gossip to whomever it was she spent most of her time with when she wasn’t home. But she didn’t want anyone else talking about it. About her.

  And she didn’t need to hear that word. Threats.

  Megan looked at her watch. Eight forty. She should be at her morning spin class, pushing through a sprint to spike her heart rate. But Courtney had advised her to deviate from her usual schedule, just in case.

  She turned her attention back to a paragraph about steroid biosynthesis in rat cells, and realized she was actually starting to feel better. She had gone a full hour without crying. Maybe in the afternoon, after classes, she’d go to the gym and use the elliptical trainer for a little while.

  As she turned the page, she heard a knock on the apartment door. She pulled one bud from her ear to make sure Heather was going to respond. Maybe she would finally meet one of Heather’s friends.

  “I’ll get it,” Heather yelled from the kitchen.

  Megan readjusted her headphones and turned back to her book just as she realized she hadn’t heard the security door buzzer.

  “No, wait,” she yelled, pulling off her headset.

  Jumping from her bed and lunging toward her bedroom door, she heard voices in the living room, then a loud groan, followed by the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.

  Megan should have stayed in her room. She should have jumped out the window to the street below if that’s what it was going to take.

  But she didn’t think. She acted on instinct. And her instinct was to help Heather. Heather. Poor innocent Heather. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

  She opened her bedroom door to see her roommate sprawled on the floor next to the breakfast table. A man in a black-wool ski mask was plunging a six-inch blade into her torso. As he pulled the knife from Heather’s body, he looked up, saw
Megan, and charged toward her.

  Following instinct again, she slammed her door shut. She found herself grasping at the doorknob, but there was no lock on the bedroom door. She pressed her back against the door, trying to hold it closed with the weight of her body, but it was no use.

  As she felt the door spring open and push her forward to the ground, Megan knew she would die. She knew she would never see her mother, father, or Courtney again. She would never graduate from college. She would never become a doctor.

  She wished she could have saved Heather. She wished she knew why this was happening. And she wished she could have said good-bye.

  PART II

  “GO AHEAD. LIE TO ME.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  10:15 A.M.

  Despite two large coffees and a cherry Danish, Ellie still felt like she’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer and then strapped to an all-night merry-go-round.

  She had gotten the tears under control by the time she and Jess made their way back to her apartment last night, but the emotions that had led to the outburst were still raw enough that she’d made the mistake of adding two Rolling Rocks at home to the two rounds of whisky she’d already consumed at Plug Uglies.

  And then of course there had been the telephone call to her mother.

  Her nightly calls to Wichita were never what she’d call the highlight of her days. At best the calls were short, just long enough for a telephonic kiss good night. At worst, they were hour-long reminiscences, with Ellie’s mother lamenting her status as a widowed bookkeeper whose happiest days were long behind her. Last night’s call fell on the crummy end of the spectrum.

  And whether it was because of the whisky, the bad jail memories, the conversation with her mother, or a combination of the three, Ellie had slept in fits and spurts for a second consecutive night.

  The case certainly wasn’t doing anything to help her stay awake. She was poring over Robert Mancini’s financial records and telephone logs while Rogan was at the courthouse briefing Judge Bandon.

  Ellie looked up to see Lieutenant Robin Tucker standing next to her desk, hands on hips in a tailored white shirt and black pantsuit.

  “Rogan’s not back yet?”

  Ellie glanced at the readout on her desk phone. Ten-fifteen. Rogan was supposed to meet Max in the judge’s chambers at nine.

  “Should be done soon,” she said.

  “Good. Call him. You two are up.” She handed Ellie a piece of paper with an address on it. East Fourteenth Street. Somewhere near Union Square Park.

  Ellie scanned the squad room and saw several other teams of detectives working away in paired sets of desks.

  “Rogan and I were hoping to take a new look at where we are on the Mancini case.”

  “I told you two you’re not protected. New callouts just like everyone else.”

  Ellie scouted out the squad room again, this time less subtly. “I’m not sure when Rogan will be done, Lou.”

  “You’re a big girl, Hatcher. Your partner will find you soon enough. Now scoot. Your body’s a dead college girl. Right up your alley. Who knows? If she’s from Indiana, you might just earn yourself another medal.”

  Her lieutenant’s quip referred to the murder last spring of a mid-western college student. The case had earned Ellie a Police Combat Cross for what the commissioner had called her “extraordinary heroism while engaged in personal combat with an armed adversary under circumstances of imminent personal hazard to life.” At the ceremony, Ellie had known the commissioner was simply reading the standard language that defined the award itself, but she had committed the words to memory anyway. They provided a palatable description of that case’s unflinching violence, both in the killer and ultimately in Ellie when she had taken his life. Robin Tucker could mock the recognition if she wanted, but Ellie knew that the finest thing she’d ever done in her life was to bring some measure of justice to that Indiana family.

  The address that Tucker had handed her turned out to be on the southwest corner of Union Square Park. Ellie approached the address from the east, hit her dashboard emergency lights to flip a mid-block U-turn, and then pulled the Crown Vic in front of a fire hydrant on Fourteenth Street. Around the corner on University Place, she saw three patrol cars, an ambulance, another unmarked fleet vehicle, and the medical examiner’s van. The gang was all there.

  The apartment building itself was a new condo, erected like so much new construction on top of a bank branch. On the other side of double glass doors off of University, she spotted a young Asian patrol officer with a crew cut inside the tiny lobby, his gaze apparently fixated on the abstract painting that filled the wall opposite the building’s elevator. She pulled on one of the doors. It was locked, but the sound of her attempt caught the patrol officer’s attention, and he pushed the door open for her.

  Ellie flipped opened the badge holder clipped to her waist. “Apartment 4C?”

  With a silent nod, he pressed the call button. She stepped inside and watched the digital readout track her trip to the fourth floor. The quiet of the elevator was immediately disrupted when the doors parted.

  “God damn it, how the fuck did the EMTs wheel the other girl out of here?”

  Ellie turned to see a short, heavyset man with a dark mustache and thick neck struggling with a gurney in the narrow hallway. She quickly counted four apartment doors—three closed, one held ajar by a uniformed patrol officer who was still staring at the black heavy-grade plastic body bag flopped on top of the aluminum gurney.

  “Coming through,” the man said. Short of breath, he pushed the gurney farther toward Ellie and the elevator. “No one’s supposed to be up here anyway. Damn it,” he cried out to no one in particular, “someone call that stupid fuck in the lobby and remind him his one and only fucking job this morning is to serve as a human shield between these apartments and any more people to get in the way.”

  “Looked like he was doing his job to me.” Ellie flashed her detective’s shield to the harried technician. “Besides, what’s the rush? Doesn’t look like you’ve got much hope of saving her.”

  “Hey, sorry about that.” He offered a gloved hand on instinct. “Gabe Berry. ME’s office.”

  She wrinkled her nose at the sight of his extended hand, and shook her head.

  “Oh, yeah, right.” He wiped the perspiration from his brow with his palm. “You’re from Homicide?”

  “Yep. You said the EMTs took a girl out of here already?”

  “Yeah, now that was a rush. They were hauling ass out of the lobby when I pulled up. Taking her to St. Vincent’s, I think.”

  “She supposed to make it?”

  “No clue. From what I could see, there was big-time bleeding. She managed to crawl to the phone and dial 911, but it didn’t look so good. They found a pulse, but it was slow and weak. Could still be a DOA.”

  “Anyone else we need to keep track of?”

  “Nope. Just this unlucky one and the other less unlucky one.”

  “And you were going to take my body before I got a look. How could you do that to me, Gabe?”

  He shrugged. “A lot of detectives don’t give a sh—don’t care. We bag and tag. They get the details later from the ME.”

  “Not me. I want to see her.”

  Plenty of detectives were content to leave the technical aspects of a case—the inspection of the body, the crime scene analysis, the collection of physical evidence—to the teams of specialists assigned those tasks in any large police department. But seeing the victim’s body wasn’t just a matter of science. It was the first—and often, only—introduction to a human being whose life had been taken. This was Ellie’s chance to see the person before all color was gone. Before a forensic pathologist cut a Y incision into her torso, removed her internal organs, and sawed open her skull. While there was perhaps still some lingering sign of the spirit that had been lost.

  “I want to see her,” she repeated.

  “Here?” He looked at both sides of the narr
ow hallway. The idea of him navigating his broad body on either side of the gurney was clearly unimaginable.

  She turned sideways and wiggled herself around the edge of the aluminum cart, careful not to place any pressure on the side of the body, and then pulled the bag’s zipper halfway down. She peeled apart the covering of the plastic to reveal the girl’s face.

  She was young. Early twenties, max. Perhaps even still a teenager. Tucker had told Ellie to expect a college girl, so it made sense that she was young.

  She was plain, at least in this condition. She had long, straight, blond hair, and Ellie could tell that this seemingly rushed technician had taken the time to arrange it around her shoulders, away from her eyes and face. Her skin was the color of Silly Putty, marred by streaks of dried red blood, but Ellie could tell that the girl’s complexion had been clear and clean. This was a girl who had taken care of herself. A few freckles darkened the bridge of her nose.

  “Who is she?”

  “Ask them.” Berry looked over his shoulder toward the apartment. Ellie noticed that the patrol officer who had been holding the door ajar was no longer there. “Like I said, I bag and tag. Some college chick, from what I heard.”

  On another day, Ellie might have told the guy to show some respect—this woman didn’t deserve to be called “some chick.” But then Ellie looked at the girl’s shiny hair, so neatly straightened inside the body bag. Berry’s demeanor came with the territory, but he had treated this girl as a person, even in death.

  She unzipped the bag farther to reveal more of the body. Ellie looked past the damage that had been inflicted by the knife, forcing herself to focus first on the person, not on the violence.

  The girl wore a ribbed cotton V-neck T-shirt and a pair of dark blue jeans. She was in good shape, with slim arms and a flat stomach. The jeans hit her just beneath the belly button, not the kind of pelvis-revealing denim for which so many young, fit women opted these days.