212

by Alafair Burke

  “And Katie pays for her mother’s care here?”

  “I wouldn’t be knowing that for sure. You’d have to check billing, but yes, my guess is Katie takes care of the bulk of it. She’s Mrs. Battle’s only visitor. And very regular lately. Her mother had a stroke a few months ago. She and I were watching the television together, and they announced that Sydney Pollack had died. Mrs. Battle was saying that The Way We Were was her favorite movie, and then all of a sudden she couldn’t talk anymore. It’s funny how those kinds of things get filed away in the brain together.”

  Ellie’s mind worked the same way, but her random connections tended to be linked to her cases. She remembered that same rainy day. She and Rogan overheard the news when they ran into a corner deli for some hot coffee. It was the same day they’d found Robert Mancini dead inside Sam Sparks’s apartment. Sydney Pollack and Sam Sparks were now forever coupled in her mental library. She hated the fact that she was thinking about the Mancini case. Now. Here. When she had Katie Battle and Megan Gunther to worry about.

  “So how did Katie handle the stroke?”

  “I think it was the first real scare Katie had about her mother. She dropped everything and came here right away. Even managed to beat the ambulance and rode to the hospital. Since then, she’s been real regular with her visits.”

  “And what are your thoughts about how Katie pays for that care?”

  “She’s a very successful real estate agent. Busy, busy, busy. Mrs. Battle is so proud. She drives the other ladies crazy, going on and on about Katie.”

  “And that’s her only source of income?”

  “What are you getting at, Officer? Has Katie done something wrong?”

  “No,” Ellie said, shaking her head. “But like I said, I have some bad news.”

  “Not about Katie.”

  “It’s bad news, ma’am. I need to speak with her.”

  “Everything’s okay though, right?”

  “If you could point me to her room.”

  “I’d better go with you. This will—well, this could kill her, quite frankly.”

  As the woman rose from her seat, Ellie caught her wiping a tear away from her cheek. Maybe Ellie was missing the point of places like Shady Pines and Glenn Forrest. Katie Battle had not been the only person to care about her mother.

  Stacy Schecter stared at the pages and pages of phone records that the good-looking black detective had spread in a layer across the laminate tabletop. She’d initially been skeptical of this enterprise. She did not want to think she was the common link.

  But a lot had happened since the blond detective suddenly ran off. Now her partner had more than just Miranda’s cell phone and the records of whatever phone number they were so curious about. Now they had her phone records, too. Going way back.

  And as she focused on the section of the itemized list of phone calls from May 27 of last spring, the detectives’ theory was hard to deny. And by the look on this detective’s face, he wanted her to make the connections faster than her thoughts were moving right now.

  Stacy could feel a chain forming in her brain, but it was as if she didn’t really want the sections to come together. She didn’t want to believe that the choices she’d made were going to put her in the middle of whatever this was turning out to be.

  Her choices. As if she’d had many.

  Whether out of decisions of her own making, or simply random fate, she was actually here, now, in a police interrogation room, staring at these records and putting together the pieces.

  It was all about May 27.

  That was the day that someone had called Stacy’s cell phone from a landline at an apartment on Fourteenth Street. It was the phone number that Stacy hadn’t recognized.

  But now that she was reviewing the records of her own cell phone for that day, she saw the significance of the date. On May 27, two hours before she had received a call from that mysterious number, she had also received a call from the woman she’d known as Miranda. Now both of the women who had called her were dead.

  Obviously there was a connection, but she just couldn’t remember. Four months was a long time.

  “Look at the other numbers on the list,” the detective urged. “Who else were you in touch with that day? It might help jog your memory.”

  “This is just a bunch of numbers to me. I don’t know my friends’ numbers. I just pull up their names in my cell phone.” She hated the sound of stress in her voice. She hated stress.

  “That’s fine, then. That’s good, in fact. If you’ve got all those numbers stored away in your phone, we just have to find them. We’ll work through your entire directory until we match these numbers up. You start from the top of your directory, read off the number, and I’ll check these logs for a match.”

  And with that they started a methodic pattern of cooperation—her reading off the numbers stored in her phone, the detective repeatedly responding with a series of nopes, occasionally encouraging her with a “Keep going” or a “We’ll find it.” Twice they’d matched numbers in her phone to entries on her phone log, but one was to the deli down the block and the other was to her sister in Seattle—nothing to help her remember the specifics of that day, let alone how Miranda fit into them.

  After what must have been eighty numbers, the pattern finally changed. She rattled off ten digits, but didn’t hear the expected “Nope.” Instead there was a pause.

  “Got it. There’s a match. That’s the first number you dialed after Katie Battle called you. It’s only a minute long. Ninety minutes later, you got a call from Megan Gunther’s apartment.”

  “It’s a number for this girl I know. Tanya something. I only know her first name. Wait, I’m starting to remember now. Miranda—God, I mean, Katie—she called me a few months ago. It must have been that day. Her mom was in the hospital, and she needed me to cover a date for her that night. I couldn’t do it, but she was freaking out about her mom, saying she didn’t know what she was going to do. So I said I’d find someone for her. And then I called Tanya. I’d met her just the previous week; some guy found us both on Craig’s List.”

  She was hoping she wouldn’t have to explain the concept of a threesome to the detective, but he waved her on when she paused.

  “Anyway, she was the first one I thought of under the circumstances. She called me back later. Maybe that’s the call you’re talking about.”

  “Tanya’s got a long-distance area code. Four-one-oh.”

  “It’s her cell from wherever she came from, just like mine’s from Connecticut. She lives in the city now.”

  “Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait. This area code. Four-one-oh. It’s from Baltimore.”

  “If you say so.”

  But she could tell the detective was worked up over something now. He opened a manila folder on top of the layer of records covering the table and started flipping through pages frantically until he finally plunked his index finger down on the center of a document. “Here it is. Here’s that same number. An incoming call to Megan Gunther’s cell phone at the beginning of May. There’s a connection here, Stacy. Between you and Katie Battle. Between you and Tanya. Now we’ve got Tanya calling Megan’s cell phone almost five months ago. And Megan’s landline calling you on May 27. There’s a connection.”

  Of course there was. But if this detective couldn’t figure it out, Stacy had no clue how she could help.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

  12:40 A.M.

  Ellie returned to the detective squad just as Rogan was resting the handset of his phone in its cradle.

  “That was quick,” he said.

  “Didn’t feel like it when I was talking to the mom, but I hauled ass on the LIE.” The call she’d made to her own mother from the car had made the drive feel even longer. “Where’s Stacy?”

  He tilted his head toward the interview room. “We’ve got something.” As they made their way to the interrogation room, Rogan walked Ellie through the tangled web
of connections he and Stacy had pieced together from the phone records. “We think the call from Megan Gunther’s apartment to Stacy was a return call from a girl Stacy only knows as Tanya.”

  “Who the hell’s Tanya?”

  “Hold your horses. I’m about to tell you. At the end of May, Katie Battle called Stacy to cover a date for her. Stacy said no can do, but called her friend Tanya to see if she could do it. An hour later, Stacy got a call from Megan Gunther’s landline. Her best recollection is that it was Tanya getting back to her. Now, here’s the kicker: about three weeks before all of that went down, we’ve also got Tanya calling Megan Gunther’s cell.”

  “So we know Tanya’s connected to Megan. She’s calling her and using her landline. So, again, who the hell’s Tanya?”

  “I did a reverse search on her Baltimore cell phone number. Comes back to someone named Tanya Abbott. I just hung up from Baltimore PD. She’s thirty years old. Only prior was a misdemeanor solicitation pop ten years ago. Cited and released. Went through a diversion program and got her case thrown out.”

  “How in the world could Megan know this Tanya person?”

  “Maybe Megan had a side of her no one knew. If she was turning tricks, she might’ve piled on the makeup.”

  They found Stacy still in her seat, still staring at the phone records. Rogan placed Megan Gunther’s photograph on the table in front of her.

  “She might have changed her appearance. Makeup. Hair color. Even wigs. Take another look.”

  Stacy let out a heavy sigh as she pondered the photograph. “I’ve never laid eyes on this girl.”

  “What about Heather Bradley?” Ellie asked. “She’s this girl’s roommate. Also at NYU.”

  Stacy looked disheartened as she shook her head once again.

  “Her picture. We need Heather’s picture.” Ellie darted from the interview room and bee-lined to her computer, where she pulled up the New York Department of Motor Vehicles database. Ninety-seven Heather Bradleys. She narrowed the field to college-age women, but still came up with twenty-one hits, with no guarantees that any of them was her Heather Bradley.

  She looked up the phone number for St. Vincent’s Hospital, and dialed it on her cell as she made her way back to the interview room.

  “I’m going to have someone at the hospital snap a photo and send it over.”

  Rogan and Stacy both listened as she navigated her way through the various connections at the hospital until she finally reached a desk nurse on Heather’s floor and explained what she needed.

  Ellie felt the pace of her heartbeat quicken as the seconds and then minutes passed while she was on hold. The Web site. Campus Juice. The harassing messages. They had immediately assumed that Megan Gunther was the intended target. She, after all, had been the one who died. And once they focused on Megan, their attention narrowed in on the Internet threats like a pinpoint laser.

  But Megan Gunther wasn’t the only person who lived in that apartment. There was her roommate. There was Heather Bradley—the roommate who said she hadn’t had a date since transferring to NYU, but who, according to Keith Guzman, spent all her time with some “mystery boyfriend” she never told Megan about. And she had dark hair, pale skin, and almond eyes. Just like Stacy Schecter and Katie Battle.

  “I’m sorry, Detective, but that patient checked out this afternoon.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “You’re the ones with handcuffs, not us. I left you on hold for so long because I was asking around. Apparently there was an issue with the insurance information she gave us. Someone went down the hall to inquire about it, and the next thing we knew, she was gone.”

  As the nurse spoke, Ellie heard a tap on the interrogation room door. She cracked it open to see one of the civilian aides extending a document in her direction. “This was marked urgent for Rogan.”

  Ellie took the pages from the aide and flipped past a cover sheet from the Baltimore Police Department to find a grainy enlargement of a Maryland driver’s license. The name on the license was Tanya Jane Abbott, but Ellie recognized the woman in the photograph. Dark hair. Pale skin. Almond eyes. Ellie had seen this woman in the hospital just that morning. Tanya Abbott was Megan Gunther’s roommate, Heather Bradley.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  1:45 A.M.

  Ellie knew the moment that she stepped from the elevator into the hallway of the fourth floor that they were too late. It felt like a week, but it had been only fifteen hours since she’d emerged from this same elevator earlier that morning to see the body of Megan Gunther being wheeled from the apartment. Now the door of that apartment was covered with two overlapping X’s of yellow crime tape, except for the one edge of a single ribbon that had fallen to the carpet below.

  Ellie kicked the loose end of tape with the pointed toe of her boot. “She beat us here.”

  Rogan slipped the key they’d retrieved from the superintendent into the lock. “We don’t know that,” he said, even as his tone suggested otherwise.

  They both headed straight to Heather’s bedroom, the room to which they’d given so little attention earlier that morning. Ellie opened the top drawer of the dresser to find an empty hole in the otherwise overstuffed collection of underwear. From there, she pulled open the closet. The hangers were spaced evenly enough, but the tidy stacks of sweaters on the shelf overhead were separated by a gap just large enough to fit a missing pile.

  Ellie slammed the closet door. “She grabbed some clothes in a hurry, and she split. And we were right about the sequence of the calls. Check your cell.”

  He gave his phone a quick glance. “No signal.”

  Back at the precinct, they had fit together the final pieces of the story that the phone records had been trying to tell. Nearly five months ago, Tanya Abbott, posing as Heather Bradley, had called Megan Gunther after seeing the ad for a roommate on Craig’s List. Less than a month later, Katie Battle called Stacy Schecter to cover a date for her. Stacy in turn called Tanya, who was now living her life as Heather. The call was only a minute long, so Stacy left a short message. But just as Rogan wasn’t able to get a signal in this building now, Tanya couldn’t use her cell to return Stacy’s call from the apartment. She’d used the landline instead.

  Ellie began searching the small desk against the window while Rogan opened the top drawer of the nightstand, searching for some sign of who Tanya Abbott was and where she might be.

  “Jesus,” Rogan said, flipping open a dog-eared copy of John Hart Ely’s Democracy and Distrust. “Why the hell would a grown woman make up a false identity just to go to college and write political science papers?”

  “She got popped ten years ago for hooking. You’re tricking already at twenty years old, the idea of being a garden-variety undergrad might sound pretty appealing.”

  “Getting into NYU with a fake application’s got to take some serious preparation. And now just like that, she bailed because the hospital couldn’t find a record of her insurance? You’d think a real grifter would try to lie her way through it.”

  “Guess she figured that once the hospital started asking questions, her whole story would unravel.”

  “So? Worst thing that could happen are some fraud charges.”

  “J. J., we need to look at this woman for a lot more than fraud.” Ellie closed the final drawer of the desk and moved on to a stack of textbooks propped against the desk on the floor, flipping each one open in case Tanya had stashed any papers inside the books. “Right now she’s our best suspect for Megan’s murder. We got distracted by Campus Juice. If Megan found out about Tanya’s secret—if she saw something, or overheard a conversation she wasn’t supposed to hear—”

  “But Heather—Jesus, what are we calling these people?”

  “Real names. Heather Bradley doesn’t exist—or if she does, she’s not the woman we care about. We’re talking about Tanya Abbott.”

  “Well, Tanya got cut up pretty good.”

  “But she didn’t die, did she? Passing herself
off as another victim is a pretty good way of throwing off suspicion. And it worked. We just assumed the roommate was collateral damage.”

  “So she kills Megan and then has enough stones to stab herself multiple times? That’s hard-core.”

  “Or she had help. Megan’s ex-boyfriend said fake Heather was always running off to meet some mystery man.”

  “Could have been a lot of different men if she was turning tricks.”

  “Or she could also have a boyfriend who was in on the con and helped get rid of the meddling roommate when the time came.”

  “If she had someone helping her, they might also be good for Katie Battle’s murder tonight at the Royalton. It’s not like a woman to inflict that kind of violence alone.”

  Ellie reached the final book in the stack, unmarked and clothbound. She flipped it open to find two photographs mounted on the first page, both black-and-whites of a woman holding a baby. “I think I found something.” She sat on the bed and began turning the pages.

  Someone had taken the care to place the photographs in chronological order—from baby to toddler to Santa Claus’s lap to a blue ribbon for the fifth-grade relay team. By the time they hit the shot of a dark-haired girl with long hair, full lips, and almond-shaped eyes, beaming from beneath a handmade banner that read “Happy 13th Birthday,” Ellie could recognize a young Tanya Abbott.

  She flipped the page and found two photographs of Tanya with a young boy, probably only four or five years old. In one, Tanya was seated on the grass next to the standing boy, squeezing him tightly to her chest—apparently too tightly, from the look on the kid’s face. In the other, the boy carried an impish expression as he smashed a snowball on top of an unwitting Tanya’s wool-capped head.

  “Little brother?” Rogan asked, looking over her shoulder.

  “Maybe.” There was something vaguely familiar about the child’s face. He had white-blond hair while Tanya was dark, but plenty of children started out as towheads and then darkened as they got older. Jess had been even blonder than she as a toddler.