212

by Alafair Burke

  When she was finished, she turned away to allow them a moment of privacy. She went so far as to close her eyes when she spotted their embrace in the reflection of the lobby’s glass door—the strong, tall father crying into his wife’s hair, the mom sobbing against her husband’s chest. She blocked out the sound of their cries by evaluating her own performance.

  She had done her best, but she nevertheless knew that Jonas and Patricia Gunther would always remember this scene—Ellie in her black turtleneck and slim gray skirt, this antiseptic lobby with its reproduced abstract art and fake marble floors, Officer Eng posed awkwardly outside the elevators with his hands clasped behind him—as the very worst kind of collision between the impersonal and the intimate.

  Once the Gunthers were ready to talk, Ellie borrowed Andrei Gorsky’s office on the second floor. Before the couple was even seated in the two metal folding chairs crammed between the superintendent’s desk and the wall, Mr. Gunther made no secret about where he placed the blame for his daughter’s death.

  “This is your people’s fault. We tried to tell you. Just yesterday. We begged you for help.”

  “Who, Mr. Gunther? You begged who for help?”

  “You. The police. There must at least be some kind of report. We were there for nearly an hour.”

  Patricia placed a calming hand on her husband’s forearm. “She doesn’t know what you’re talking about, Jonas. She’ll understand better if we just explain it to her.”

  “Fine. You explain to her what we tried to tell them yesterday, while our daughter could still be protected.”

  “We went to a precinct yesterday. On Tenth Street.”

  “The Sixth Precinct,” Ellie clarified.

  “Right. The Sixth. We spoke with a Sergeant Martinez. Our daughter was being stalked on a Web site. It’s called Campus Juice dot com. They told us they’d already talked to the district attorney, and they couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “Megan was terrified,” Jonas added. “Whoever was posting that…filth, knew her schedule. He said he was watching her. And you people wouldn’t do anything.”

  “The sergeant said they’d had complaints about the site before,” Patricia explained. “Some kind of First Amendment thing that the police couldn’t touch.”

  “It was threatening. It was stalking. What are the police for if they—”

  “I am very sorry, Mr. Gunther. I’m not going to defend what took place yesterday because I simply don’t know anything about it. I take your word on what occurred, and God knows you’re entitled to be furious right now and forever. But the faster I can figure out who we should be talking to now about what happened in your daughter’s apartment, the sooner I can give you some answers.”

  Jonas nodded sternly. “Campus Juice dot com. I assume that today, unlike yesterday, you will be able to make the Web site tell you who was harassing Megan.”

  Ellie wrote down the name of the Web site.

  “Wait,” Patricia said. “I still have the printouts we showed the sergeant.”

  She opened a large brown leather shoulder bag, removed a thin stack of folded white paper, and handed it to Ellie. Ellie skimmed the pages.

  “We will definitely contact the Web site to track down whoever wrote these things about your daughter. But did Megan have a sense of who the author might be?”

  Jonas shook his head. Patricia quickly followed suit, but Ellie noticed the short pause.

  “Mrs. Gunther? Were you going to say something?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head once again. “Megan didn’t have any enemies.”

  “Sometimes we have enemies we don’t think of in that way. A boyfriend, maybe? An ex? I noticed she was wearing a heart-shaped pendant.”

  “Our daughter was premed,” Jonas said. “She was focused on school.”

  Patricia said nothing.

  “I see. Because, you know, if there was anyone, anything, you can think of—no matter how far-fetched—it could prevent us from wasting time chasing down false leads. You never know…even someone who was just a friend might have noticed something unusual. It could really help.”

  “There was a boy,” Patricia said. Her husband turned quickly in surprise but said nothing. “His name was Keith. I don’t know all the details, but he wanted more from Megan than she was in a position to give. He was clingy, I guess you could say. Last I heard, Megan broke it off a few months ago.”

  “Did he give her any trouble about that?” Ellie asked.

  “Not that I know of. But, you know, before the breakup, it was on and off, here and there. Megan didn’t tell me much, but I could see she was stressed. I was worried it would get in the way of school, so I was relieved when she finally cut the cord.”

  Ellie recalled what the superintendent had said about seeing a guy with a pierced lip accompany Megan to and from her apartment.

  “Did Keith happen to have a pierced lip?”

  “I’m not sure,” Patricia said. “Wait. Maybe. I don’t know. Megan said something once about how we wouldn’t approve of him, even at first sight. Something like that. So maybe.”

  “Do you know anything else about this Keith? A last name? Where he lives? Is he a student?”

  Patricia shook her head. So did her husband, but for a different reason.

  “You knew this? Why didn’t you say anything yesterday? The sergeant—he was on our side there at the end, but he said there was nothing he could do. If we’d known this boy’s name, he could have called him. Scared him. Told him to back off.”

  “Don’t, Jonas. Don’t say that.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? Was I that hard on Megan? You couldn’t even trust me enough to let me know she had a boyfriend? Even yesterday? Even with those messages?”

  “I’m very sorry,” Ellie said, interrupting. “It would be helpful if you could make a list of some of your daughter’s friends. We can follow up with them.”

  She pushed a pad of paper and a pen across the desk toward Patricia, who looked relieved by the distraction.

  When Ellie finally escorted the Gunthers back to the lobby of their dead daughter’s apartment complex, she noticed that they did not hold hands on the way out of the elevator, as they had on their way up to the superintendent’s office. As she watched them walk into the sunlight of University Place, she wondered if that meager oversight—the failure to grab a spouse’s hand—was just the beginning.

  For the next few months, they would be grateful to have another person who cherished Megan. But as time passed and they began to long for at least one hour during which they did not think about what they’d lost, Jonas might begin to wish that Patricia’s nose wasn’t pointed at the tip the way Megan’s had been. And Patricia might look away when Jonas jutted his jaw out, the way Megan had.

  And Ellie wondered if she had witnessed the beginning of the transformation: that moment in Gorsky’s office. Jonas asking why Patricia hadn’t spoken up yesterday. Patricia thinking, but not saying, that she would have—Megan would have—if Jonas hadn’t been so overbearing.

  Resentment. Fault. Blame.

  She wondered if whoever killed Megan Gunther had also destroyed the very best of what she had known in her parents.

  She had shoddy reception inside the building, so she stepped outside to call Max. He picked up after just one ring.

  “Hey, you.”

  “Hey.”

  “I hear you got another callout.”

  “You’ve got spies tailing me? We may need to have a little chat about boundaries.”

  “No spies,” he said with a chuckle. “I was with Rogan this morning when he got your message.”

  “Yeah, how’d things go with Bandon? J. J.’s been a little jumpy since he showed up.”

  “It was fine. Just Bandon pretending to be principled, thorough, and objective. Of course, that didn’t stop Rogan from going on a tear both before and after we were in chambers.”

  “But he was on good behavior for the middle part at least?�
��

  “Yeah, he held it together. What have you been up to?”

  “New callout. Still figuring out who’s who.”

  “Which means you probably weren’t calling me to whisper sweet nothings in my ear.”

  “Sweet nothings.”

  “Wow, so hot.”

  “What can you tell me about Web site postings?” She gave Max a quick summary of what she had learned from the Gunthers and the complaint they had made yesterday about Campus Juice.

  “Sounds like the cop they talked to at the precinct had it about right, although he should have filed a report to build a record.”

  “We don’t like being told to write stuff down that’s never going anywhere. If that sergeant had been told by the DA’s office that nothing could be done, that’s the only part of the discussion he’s going to remember.”

  “The DA’s office was involved?” he asked.

  “According to the parents, that’s what this sergeant told them.”

  “You just need to know any identifying information for whoever posted those messages. Is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, give me the dates, times, and titles of the posts.”

  Ellie flipped through the printout the Gunthers had given her and recited the information Max had requested.

  “All right. Let me look into it, and I’ll call you right back.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was the sweet nothings that did the trick.”

  Ellie was on her way back to the apartment building when Rogan stepped outside.

  “Got word from the hospital. The roommate’s conscious.”

  “She’s going to make it?” Ellie asked.

  “Yeah. At least one of them had luck on her side.”

  As they turned the corner onto Fourteenth Street, Ellie could see that the lunch-hour rush at the Union Square green market was under way. The skateboarders who transformed the south park steps into stunt ramps dodged shoppers juggling canvas tote bags filled with organic greens and heirloom tomatoes. Dog walkers tugged on leashes, pulling their hopeful charges past the enticing displays of fresh food. Only a few passersby even stopped to glance at the gathering of official city vehicles that had descended upon the corner of Fourteenth and University.

  “Your ride or mine?” Rogan asked, looking at the two identical fleet cars.

  “The usual.”

  As she hopped into the passenger side of the Crown Vic, she overheard a woman who was walking into the bank tell her friend, “Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. Crime’s so low, the police show up for anything these days.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  12:10 P.M.

  The half-mile drive to St. Vincent’s was a straight shot west on Fourteenth Street, then a quick left turn on Seventh Avenue. Rogan swerved around the two layers of ambulances stacked on the west side of the hospital and took another quick left on Eleventh Street, pulling the car to a halt at the curb.

  As they exited the car, a bicyclist pedaling west on Eleventh yelled out, “Wrong way on a one-way, idiot.”

  “NYPD,” Rogan hollered. “And you’re not wearing a helmet, so who’s the idiot? I’d give you a ticket, but I guess you’ll learn your lesson when your brains wind up on the dash of a cab.”

  The cyclist flipped them the bird as he sailed through the light at Seventh Avenue.

  “Picking fights with boys on bikes?” Ellie asked.

  He threw her a dry look and opened the hospital door. Ellie flashed her shield at the front information desk. “We need to see Heather Bradley. She was admitted about two hours ago with multiple stab wounds.”

  She turned back to Rogan while the clerk tapped away at her computer keyboard. “Are you going to tell me what’s up or not?”

  “This morning, that’s all.”

  “Bandon put you through the ringer?”

  “Detectives, Heather Bradley is in the ICU. You’ll find it—”

  “Eighth floor,” Ellie said. “Got it.”

  As they made their way to the intensive care unit, Ellie nudged Rogan again. “So, Bandon gave you shit?”

  Rogan shrugged. “It was nothing specific.”

  “Max said it wasn’t too bad.”

  “Max, huh?” Rogan said with a smile.

  “ADA Donovan. Whatever. So it was bad?”

  “Just the whole damn thing was messed up from the get-go. Bandon making us brief him so he can schmooze his ass all the way to the federal bench on Sam Sparks’s back.”

  “The thought of his ass on Sparks’s back is pretty disturbing.”

  “Damn, you are pissing me off right now. I thought you hated these two knobjobs at least as much as I did.”

  “I don’t think anyone hates a single person on the planet as much as you seem to hate Sparks and Bandon today. I mean, hate groups are calling for lessons on how to hate more deeply.”

  “Yeah? Well, some lame-ass-joke group has been calling for you.”

  “Seriously, did it go all right or not?”

  Another shrug. “Yeah, it was fine. Your boy Donovan made it cut-and-dried.”

  “Hey, you managed to walk out of chambers without handcuffs and jail scrubs, so you clearly did better than me.”

  “Sorry I’m PMSing. I’ll get over it. You run the show with this girl upstairs? You always do better with the young white girls.”

  “That’s not what you said yesterday about Kristen Woods.”

  Ellie immediately regretted making any further reference to the Sparks case. When the elevator doors opened, Rogan had one more comment. “You think Tucker gave us this callout to keep us from bothering Sparks?”

  “Yep.”

  “Any thoughts about what we can do about that?”

  “Find out who the hell killed Megan Gunther and then get right back up Sparks’s ass again.”

  Even in a hospital bed, with an IV in her arm and bruises on her face and neck, Heather Bradley was objectively attractive. Her sable-colored hair fell in loose curls past her shoulders. As a resident pointed a pen-size flashlight into her pupils, she blinked her almond-shaped green eyes, dark lashes contrasting against flawless pale skin.

  “Excellent,” the resident announced. “Hard to believe that an hour ago we were worried whether you’d make it.”

  Ellie tapped the open hospital room door.

  “Yes?” the young doctor asked.

  “We were told Ms. Bradley might be ready for a few questions?”

  He looked to his patient for guidance, and Heather nodded. “Unless you think it’s better that I not.”

  “It’s totally up to you,” he said.

  “I want to help,” she said.

  “Be quick?” the doctor said quietly as he passed them. “She’s a lot better off than we feared at first, but she’s still in shock and needs some rest.”

  “Hi, Heather. I’m Ellie Hatcher with the NYPD. This is my partner, J. J. Rogan.”

  “It’s almost funny,” Heather said. “I was about to say ‘Nice to meet you’ out of habit, but—”

  “I know. Not exactly nice circumstances,” Ellie said. “How much do you know about what happened in your apartment this morning?”

  “I know that Megan didn’t make it. I know that some crazy person forced the door open with a knife and began attacking me.”

  Some crazy person. Ellie had hoped that Heather would be able to give them the name of someone she recognized, someone the girls knew.

  “How did he force the door open?” Rogan asked. They had seen no damage to the girls’ apartment door.

  “There was a knock. I just assumed it was for Megan. As soon as I opened the door, he pushed his way in.”

  “Just one person?” Ellie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any idea who it was?” Ellie already knew the answer to the question, but it seemed natural to ask. Heather shook her head. “What did he look like?”

  Heather paused. “I don’t even know. He was wearing, like, this bl
ack ski mask thing. I’m pretty sure he was white. At least that’s how I’m picturing the skin beneath the mask.”

  This was not good.

  “What about his clothes?” Ellie asked.

  Another pause. “Jeans, I think. And a long-sleeved shirt,” Heather said with more confidence. “That, I remember, because I tried to scratch at his arms, but all I got was fabric. I’m sorry. It just happened really fast, and I was thrashing around trying to fight him off. I didn’t see very much.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  Heather shook her head again. “He just came at me. It was…totally crazy. He was cutting at me and slicing me, and all I could do was try to get away or push him off of me. Then I decided to play dead, but then Megan opened her bedroom door.”

  “And you—”

  “Just laid there.” Tears welled in Heather’s eyes, and she dropped her gaze. “I knew I couldn’t help. I could barely get to the phone after he left. But I should have—”

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” Ellie said firmly. “You did exactly the right thing. You survived, Heather. Don’t ever regret that.”

  “But it feels so…wrong. Maybe if—”

  “Did Megan talk to you about this problem she was having with a Web site called Campus Juice?”

  Heather reestablished eye contact with Ellie and nodded. “Just yesterday. You think this had something to do with those postings?”

  “We don’t think anything yet,” Ellie said. “We’re just running through all the possibilities. Did Megan have any idea who might have posted those things about her?

  “No. She seemed really thrown off by the whole situation. And really scared. It seemed totally out of the blue, you know?” She seemed even more disturbed by the thought that she and her roommate might have known someone who would do this.

  “How so?” Ellie asked.

  Heather paused. “Like, you know, Megan was just the kind of person who minded her own business. School. Exercise. A couple girlfriends. She didn’t really seem the type to have, you know, trouble.”