“You were perfect, Jasmine.”
She removed her hands from Ellie’s and used them to pull Max’s sweatshirt up over her chin. Ellie knew that sweatshirt would smell good, like a blend of truffles and cedar and lavender and coffee. Like Max. Like home. It was the kind of smell that made a woman feel safe.
For a second, Jasmine looked happy.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
12:35 P.M.
“I don’t know how many times I need to explain this to you, Detectives. I’m a business owner.” David Taylor tugged at the lapels of his navy sports jacket as if the attire spoke for itself. “I spent what seemed like a lifetime owning a bar on the Upper East Side in the nineties. Check it out. No marks on my license. A good relationship with the boys in the Nineteenth. Call Ed Devlin up there. He might be retired by now, but he’ll tell you, I’m good people.”
Ellie had been pacing behind Taylor in the interrogation room as he repeated his mantra that he was a legitimate businessman. Now she leaned one hip against the table in front of him. “You don’t own a bar anymore, Uncle Dave, and the boys in the Nineteenth don’t know bupkes about Prestige Parties. Or, if they do, they’re not exactly going to tell me, now are they?”
“The bar”—Taylor pronounced it “Bah,” with a northeast accent—“closed down almost ten years ago. Made a mistake not buying the building when I had the chance. Couldn’t keep up with the rents, you know. Turned out okay, though. All those hours keeping bar, I saw how things work. Hardworking men with a lot of money but not a lot of time just want someone pretty to spend an evening with. Classy, smart, attractive girls.”
“Prostitutes,” Ellie said. “And you’re their pimp.”
“No way, ma’am. I know better than that. I want no part of such a thing. I’m a Catholic, for God’s sake. Pretty sure the pope frowns on pimping. I even had a lawyer draw up documents for the girls to sign, just in case they got the wrong idea. No sex allowed. No way, no how, or they’re out the door.”
She’d had Taylor in this room for twenty minutes now, and his story wasn’t budging. Rogan was down the hall in another interrogation room with Corliss LaMarche. The last Ellie had heard, Cadence was rock solid, so Rogan had moved her to a holding cell so he could work on the weaker sister alone.
“We’ve got your employee Corliss on tape, Taylor.” She hit the play button on the digital recorder and heard Jasmine’s voice as clearly as if she were sitting in the room with them.
“Just for one trick, you know?” Taylor smiled with satisfaction as Corliss corrected her: “You mean an appointment, Jasmine.”
His face fell slightly when Corliss explained the buyout requirement for private dates. “Uncle Dave’s a real stickler about that.”
“Oh, wait,” Ellie said, “here comes my favorite part.” She caught a slight chuckle in Taylor’s breath as Jasmine described performing oral sex as her date attempted to remove the condom.
“We tell everyone to keep it safe, but some of the girls still accept bareback on oral. And, don’t forget, watch it on the phone, Jasmine, okay?”
Ellie hit the stop button, and Taylor shook his head. “I can’t believe Corliss would stand for such a thing. If she and some of the girls have been engaged in this kind of conduct, it was certainly not with my knowledge. I’ve been absolutely clear—”
“I know, I know,” Ellie said. “No sex. They signed the papers.”
“Exactly.”
She heard a knock on the door and cracked it open to find Rogan.
“Wait a second,” Taylor said. “Don’t tell me. This is the part where someone comes in and tells me that that airhead Corliss dimed me up as the big bad boss in charge of the whole operation. Well, guess what, Detectives? I’ve seen every single episode of Law and Order, and I’m not falling for it. Corliss did this on her own. I’m a legitimate businessman, and if you don’t believe me, you can talk to my lawyer.”
Rogan opened the door ajar. “Actually, Mr. Taylor, I wasn’t here to speak with you at all. You have a guest here to see you.”
Behind Rogan stood a house of a woman, nearly six feet tall, an easy two hundred pounds, with bright orange hair and green eye-shadow that managed to clash with her multicolored floral silk shirt and thick gold cuff necklace. “God damn it, Dave. What the hell have you dragged my daughters into?”
“This is Mr. Taylor’s sister, Karen LaMarche. She’s Corliss and Cadence’s mother. She’d like to have a word with her brother.”
Apparently Uncle Dave was literally Uncle Dave.
Fifteen minutes after they left Karen LaMarche alone in the interrogation room with her brother, they heard a tap against the one-way window. Taylor wasn’t lying when he said he’d watched a lot of Law and Order.
By the time they opened the door, Taylor’s sister was already pressing her way past Ellie. “My son of a bitch brother will tell you whatever you need to hear,” she said. “But my girls, my daughters, they get a deal. They walk.”
Ellie had already called Max as she’d eavesdropped on the conversation between Taylor and his sister. He was prepared to grant immunity to Corliss and Cadence as long as they cooperated.
“Only if Dave here agrees,” Ellie said. “No deal for him. Just the girls. We need full access to every piece of information Prestige Parties has. All clients. All dates.”
“But Corliss and Cadence get a full walk, right?” Taylor asked. “No one can even know I got them into this. Their names can’t be on any single piece of paper. Nothing.”
“No problem.”
“Okay, then, yeah, whatever. I got all of it in the computer. Go to town on it.”
“Where?” Ellie asked.
“At home, whaddaya think? But welcome to the twenty-first century, sweetheart. Some tech dweeb—one of those guys who tells you his name is John but you know it’s really Sanji—hooked me up so me and the girls could all access the appointments whenever we wanted. Get me online and I can tell you what you need to know. Let’s get this over with, for my nieces’ sake.”
Karen LaMarche gave Ellie a satisfied smile.
“What got into him?” Ellie asked as the woman turned to walk away.
“Would you believe me if I said an uncle’s love for his family?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s just say I’ve got dirt on him that might not land him upstate, but would cost him big at home.”
“Bigger than serving three to five for running a prostitution ring?” Rogan asked.
“Don’t ask me why, but my sister-in-law, Carmen? She loves that fat slob. Worships the ground he walks on. She’ll visit him every week in prison and won’t give a damn whether you take every last nickel from their bank account. She’ll find it in herself to forgive him, but not if she knows he brought my girls into it. She loves them like they’re her own. It would break her heart. And even though my brother’s a pig, he just couldn’t live with himself.” She stopped and called out to her brother. “You hear me, Dave? You be nice to these detectives, or I’ll be here with my cell phone calling Carmen right in front of you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving her to leave him in the relative peace of the run-down interrogation room.
They were interrupted by a knock on the door, followed by the tentative peek of the civilian aide who monitored the front desk. “Detective Hatcher. There’s a woman here to see you. She was very persistent but won’t give me her name.”
Rogan waved her to go. “I think Dave and I are just fine now. Let’s see if we can’t get a laptop in here.”
The woman was waiting in the rickety wooden chair next to Ellie’s desk. Her perfectly tailored jade green suit and freshly set hair looked out of place among the dinge and dishevel of the squad room.
“Mrs. Bandon.” Ellie offering her outstretched hand, Laura Bandon gave it a limp shake.
“Thank you for making time for me, Detective. I hope you’ll understand why I didn’t want to give my name to the young man up front.”
Ellie took
a seat across from her at the desk. “I’m not sure that I do, actually.”
“I’m aware of the subject of your visit to my apartment yesterday morning. I thought as a woman, I might implore you to treat this as a private matter between me and my husband.”
“It’s not just a matter of privacy. There are crimes involved. And your husband is a judge. He used to be a prosecutor. I’m sure at some point he has sent someone to jail for doing what he did here.”
Laura crossed her manicured hands in her lap. “Paul has plenty of failings as a man, and I suppose being a hypocrite is one of them. But we have a son, and a family, and, if you must know, a certain understanding.” She held Ellie’s gaze. “I was aware of this woman—not her specifically, but of her existence—if it makes any difference to you.”
“It doesn’t make any difference as far as the law is concerned.”
“Well, it probably should. I’ll spare you the details of my own shortcomings, but the truth is, we’re both happier if he has his outside activities. He’s still very much devoted to me and our son. And if this becomes public, my husband won’t be the only one harmed by it. My son will enter Harvard Law School a laughingstock. I will become that woman with the stoic stare during her Stand By My Man moment. You saw what happened to Eliot Spitzer’s wife. Here was a woman who had been a successful lawyer in her own right at one of the best law firms in the nation. And just because of a private decision she made with her husband, she’s mocked now by the entire city as some brainwashed, antifeminist Stepford Wife.”
Ellie had Googled Laura Bandon just yesterday and could understand why the woman empathized with New York’s former first lady. Like her, Laura had graduated from the country’s top schools, had worked several years at a big law firm, and then served on numerous charitable boards even after she stopped practicing law.
“She was in that sort of spotlight for a moment,” Ellie said. “But who knows? She could be secretary of state in a few years.”
“It’s not worth the humiliation. Please, I’m begging you, Detective. All I’m asking is that, before you decide, please give some thought to the other lives you’ll be affecting. This isn’t just about Paul.”
She rose and walked away without waiting for a response.
“Yeah, here it is. Friday night.” On the laptop screen in front of him, David Taylor pointed to a spreadsheet entry for the night of Katie Battle’s murder. “She had an initial meet-up at six o’clock at the bar of the Royalton Hotel. She called in safe. That’s a nice joint. Went there once in the nineties and saw Bryan Adams, standing right there in the lobby. He was a good guy. Let me take a picture—”
Rogan tapped Taylor on the back.
“Yo, watch it.” Maybe it was more than a tap.
“Enough with the reminiscing,” Rogan said. “Who was the date, Uncle Dave? Who met Katie at the Royalton that night?”
“Doesn’t say.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t say? You’ve got to have a phone number or a credit card or something.”
“Well, we usually do.”
“So why don’t you have it this time?” Rogan asked.
“’Cause apparently Cadence booked it anonymously.”
“I didn’t think you did that,” Ellie said. “Isn’t that the whole reason these girls give you half the money? They figure if the johns are giving you their names and phone numbers, there’s a layer of accountability built into the process. They assume they’re safe.”
Taylor shrugged. “Yeah, well, that’s the ideal, but it ain’t always realistic. It’s like that pregnant girl said about abstinence—”
Ellie shook her head. “Bad analogy, Dave.”
“Look, all I can tell you is Cadence booked the date the day before. We usually get some kind of contact information, but some guys are nervous. They got girlfriends, wives. They’re afraid of cops. Whatever. So we use our, you know, our discretion. My nieces have good judgment. If they sent Miranda out with someone, he presented good over the phone. Rich. Classy. And, like I said, she called in safe.”
“Just because someone sounds safe, you assume he is? You never heard of a guy named Ted Bundy?”
“Baah, Ted Bundy. If that guy had walked into my bar, I would’ve known he was wrong. You’re a detective. You gotta know what I mean. It’s instinct. I probably shouldn’t tell you how long we’ve been doing this, but we go on our guts, and we’ve never had a problem.”
“Sure, until now. I think what happened to Katie Battle qualifies as a problem.” Ellie made a mental note to put Katie’s mother in touch with a lawyer. With any luck, David Taylor would wind up paying for the care her daughter couldn’t quite afford.
“I know, you’re trying to make me feel guilty. You don’t think I’ve spent the last day and a half wondering if I could have done something more to protect that girl? I’m not a monster. But you know what? She’s the one who made that choice for herself. I don’t force anyone to do nothing they don’t want to do. Plus, take a look at this. This checkmark right here? That means the guy specifically asked for Miranda. We keep track of that sort of thing in case she can’t make it, you know? You can’t just send some other girl if he asked for a certain one. And, speaking for Cadence, I gotta think that she figured anyone who already knew the girl had to be one of her former customers. She figured he was all right.”
Rogan leaned over to get a better look at the laptop. “If the guy already knew her as Miranda, he might’ve known her through your service.”
“Could be. She’d been working for us for about a year.”
“Can you pull up a list of all the clients you ever booked for her?”
“Yeah, no problem,” Taylor said.
If they were lucky, they’d find someone whose background overlapped with Tanya Abbott’s. Maybe someone from Baltimore.
Taylor laughed and shook his head as he examined the list of calendar entries he’d pulled up on the screen. “Now that one there could’ve been worth a mint. If I’d really been smart, I should have closed up shop and gotten into the blackmail business before this shower of crap came pouring down on me.”
“What are you talking about?” Rogan asked.
Taylor pointed to a charge on a credit card belonging to the SDS Group. “Let’s just say the person behind that corporation is someone we’ve all heard of.”
“Names, Taylor.”
The glint in Taylor’s beady eyes might as well have been dollar signs. He was working through the blackmail angle, wondering whether he might raise some cash for a legal defense fund.
“We can call the state for information about the corporation. That’s how we found you, remember?” Rogan raised his hand for another light tap of the back, but Taylor stopped him.
“Okay, whatever. Far as I know, the SDS Group’s an arm of Sparks Industries.”
Ellie and Rogan stared at each other in silence.
“What? You guys have heard of Sam Sparks, right?”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
2:35 P.M.
“We’re missing something.” Ellie tossed back the rest of her Diet Coke, squeezed the can into the shape of an hourglass, and pitched it into the recycling bin in the corner, the latest sign of a reformed NYPD.
Their whiteboard had spiraled into a spiderweb of tangled lines in blue, black, and purple marker. Photographs, phone records, and printouts from Prestige Parties covered nearly every inch of the table and floor of the interrogation room.
They were missing something. And it had something to do with Tanya Abbott.
“Separate what we know as fact from what we’ve been speculating,” Rogan said. He rotated the plane of the whiteboard to bring forward a clean slate for notes. “Fact: Tanya Abbott was Robert Mancini’s date on the night of May 27.”
“Fact,” Ellie said, “Katie Battle was originally supposed to be the woman on that date, but when her mother had a stroke, Katie called Stacy to cover for her, who in turn called Tanya Abbott.”
Rogan jotted dow
n the facts on the board with a thick black marker. “The date was booked through Prestige anonymously, but the caller asked specifically for Miranda, suggesting he’d dated her before.”
“That second part’s speculation,” Ellie said.
“We’ll write it in blue, then,” Rogan said, switching pens for the final notation.
“Fact: Sam Sparks’s company uses Prestige Parties and, specifically, had previously retained the services of Katie Battle. Fact: Judge Paul Bandon utilized the services of Tanya Abbott. Fact: Judge Paul Bandon took a special interest in our investigation of the Robert Mancini homicide.”
Rogan paused. “You really think we can call that fact?”
“Yes, I do. And I’m not talking about my little stopover in lockup. I’m willing to suck that up as my own doing. But hauling you in for a briefing on the status of the case? That was not standard operating procedure. So, yes, fact. Our speculation was that Bandon was trying to kiss up to Sparks so he would grease the political wheels for him. But maybe we’re missing an entirely different kind of motive.”
“Such as?”
Ellie smiled. “Not to say I told you so, but what if Sparks really did do it? What if he killed Robert Mancini because the bodyguard saw more than he was supposed to?”
“You’re forgetting that Tanya Abbott did it.”
“That’s not fact. That’s speculation.”
“Fact: She posted all that nonsense about Megan Gunther online to throw us off track. Fact: Shortly after disappearing, she threatened us and our families if we kept looking for her.”
“Set aside Tanya and Megan for a second.”
“It’s a lot to set aside,” Rogan said.
“Just hear me out. We’ve got almost twenty charges in the last year and a half by Prestige Parties onto Sparks’s corporate charge card. And we’ve got Robert Mancini’s final night connected to Prestige Parties and to Tanya Abbott.”
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