212 eh-3

by Alafair Burke

  In the reflection of the mirror, she saw Dillon turn toward the staircase and tuck his handgun into his waistband. Ellie jerked her arm out of view and pulled her body farther from the basement door, waving two fingers at Tucker to indicate that she should reposition herself farther down the hallway. Tucker took two steps to her left and raised her eyebrows to signal she was ready.

  She heard Dillon step onto the first stair. The stride of his feet against the steps continued unbroken. The basement door began to open. Dillon stepped into the hallway.

  “Freeze,” she yelled. “Down on your knees. Hands up. Hands up.”

  She’d replay the next milliseconds in her mind’s eye countless times. What had she seen? Had Dillon’s hands reached for his weapon? Had they reached over his head as she’d commanded? Had they moved at all? The subtle movements of a man’s body in less than a second’s time, when he was surprised to see her, and when she feared for her safety, could never fully be reconstructed.

  She knew with certainty, however, what happened a second after Dillon first spotted her outside the doorway. She heard the blast of gunfire—two shots—and saw Dillon fall to his knees, red stains blossoming at his stomach and on the collar of his light blue dress shirt. She saw him look up to her in confusion as he fell to the ground. And then she saw his eyes move from her to Robin Tucker, whose Glock was still raised, ready to fire again if necessary. Dillon’s own weapon was at his waistband. Ellie bent over his limp and bleeding body and removed it to be safe.

  She heard the faint sound of multiple sirens in the distance.

  “He reached for his gun,” Tucker said, reholstering her Glock. “Don’t look at me like that, Hatcher. He reached. You saw it. Didn’t you see it? Tell me you saw that. He would’ve killed us.”

  Then came the first of the many times Ellie would try to replay that partial second—that tiny gap of time between the opening of the basement door and the sound of Tucker’s shots. Maybe Dillon had reached for his waist and Tucker simply had a better view from her position. Or maybe he hadn’t, but would have half a second later if Tucker hadn’t fired. All Ellie knew was that she hadn’t seen his hands move. She also knew that her beliefs about what she’d actually seen didn’t really matter.

  Dillon was a killer. She, Tucker, and Stacy were alive. Ellie was raised by a cop. She knew how this worked. As far as the official record was concerned, Dillon had reached for his weapon. Tucker would say so. So would Ellie. And, from the looks of the blood beginning to pool on the floor beneath him, Dillon wouldn’t be around to give his side of the story.

  Her lieutenant still seemed to be processing what she’d just done as Ellie stepped around Dillon’s body. “I was outside,” she said. “Down the street. Watching. I saw him come with her. I thought—I thought he was fooling around. And then the unis knocked and left. And then you showed up, ran off, and came back again. When I saw the broken window, I realized—Hatcher, what am I going to say?”

  “He reached for his gun.”

  “But I was here. At his house. I was watching him.”

  Ellie was already taking the basement stairs two at a time. She could tell from the approaching sounds of sirens that backup would be there soon. “You were coming over to surprise him. It’s fine. Call dispatch,” she yelled. “Have them send two ambulances.”

  Stacy let out a sob when she saw Ellie turn the corner toward her.

  “Is he gone?”

  Her words were strained as she struggled to control her breath. Her ankles and wrists were bound together at the small of her back in a complex tangle of black nylon rope. Ellie relieved some of the pressure from Stacy’s limbs by supporting the weight of her bent legs in her own hands.

  “We need a knife. Tucker, can you hear me? Find a knife.”

  Her lieutenant descended the stairs seconds later wielding a ten-inch chef’s knife. Stacy’s body stiffened at the sight.

  “Shh,” Ellie said, reaching for Tucker’s extended hand. “It’s okay now. He’s dead.”

  She sawed at the rope, freeing Stacy’s hands and feet. Stacy’s weight dropped limp against the concrete, and she began to cry.

  “Thank you,” she wailed between sobs. “Oh, my God. Thank you.”

  Ellie crouched on the floor beside her, rubbing her shoulder as Stacy’s breath started to return to normal. She heard Tucker’s footsteps on the basement stairs and then in the living room above her, followed by heavier footsteps and the sounds of police radios. The backup had finally arrived.

  “The cavalry’s here,” Ellie said, tugging the hem of Stacy’s dress over her bare thighs. “Let’s get you put together.”

  She helped Stacy to her feet. She wobbled at first but managed the steps slowly as she held Ellie’s hand for support. Just as she reached the final step, she turned to look at Ellie.

  “I know what he did to Katie. She tried not to tell him who I was. She tried to protect me. I tried at first, but I just couldn’t do it. I told him about Tanya. I told him she was the girl at that apartment that night.”

  Ellie gave her hand a squeeze. “You were strong, Stacy. And Tanya will be okay. He’s gone now.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  9:15 P.M.

  The Maybach slowed in front of the house. Sparks stepped from the driver’s seat just as the EMTs were rolling Dillon’s gurney out the front door. The change in his face from panic to absolute devastation told a story about his relationship with Nick Dillon—the secret that Dillon had killed to protect.

  “Nick,” he cried out. He did not need to see beneath the white sheet to understand the significance of the swarm of police cars and ambulances.

  Ellie and Robin Tucker were standing guard over Stacy Schecter as she sat on a bench on the front porch, an EMT wrapping the lacerations on her wrists and monitoring her for signs of shock.

  “I’ll be all right,” Stacy said, clearly sensing Ellie’s hesitation to leave. Tucker placed a reassuring hand on the woman’s shoulder as Ellie made her way across the lawn.

  By the time she reached Sparks, a uniform officer was holding him back from the cluster of emergency vehicles in the middle of the street. Sparks saw Ellie approaching and held her gaze.

  “Please. Please tell me he’s still alive.”

  Ellie shook her head, and he seemed to collapse against the uniform officer. The confused cop walked him back toward the Maybach, where he rested his weight on the front bumper.

  “No, oh God no.” He placed his face in his hands. “It’s my fault.”

  She stood and let him cry. And talk. He wasn’t in custody. No Miranda warnings were required. And he was about to give them more of a confession than she could ever get through interrogation.

  “I should’ve known. I should have said something. I didn’t know. At first, when Robo was killed, I wondered. But I didn’t know.”

  “He was blackmailing Dillon.”

  Sparks nodded. “It started when Nick was in Afghanistan. Robo found out about Nick—”

  “That he was gay.”

  “It wasn’t about that at first. It was Nick being stupid, shaking down some opium farmer he stumbled on during a security job in Nangahar Province. Robo and his people came through on patrol and found Nick where he wasn’t supposed to be. Nick made up some b.s. story, but Robo figured out what was going on.”

  “You knew about this?”

  “Of course not,” he said, shaking his head. “Not until later. Nick would tell me old stories about cops ripping off dealers, but he always made it sound like he was talking about someone else. Robo made it clear to Nick that he expected a job when he was discharged. By the time that happened, I had convinced Nick to come back to New York. He wasn’t happy about working for me, but it was supposed to be temporary, a way for him to bolster his corporate security credentials without being over in that hellhole. Then he’d move on to another company.”

  “So he hired Mancini?”

  Sparks’s eyes remained glued on the ambulance as Dillon’s
body was wheeled into the back. “For a while, things were all right. But then Robo walked in on us once in Nick’s office. It was just a kiss, but still, it was obvious what was going on. Next thing we knew, he was asking for a much better job—well, a non-job really—at an exorbitant salary. I wanted to pay it, but my accounting staff would have asked questions. And Nick, with those cop instincts, said it would never stop. Robo would just keep asking for more. And then May 27 happened.”

  “You had to know it was Nick.”

  “I think I was still in denial about the entire situation. When I got the call about a problem at the 212, I made a point to find Robo to deal with it. It’s like I was trying not to be intimidated. To remind him who he worked for. I had no idea he was the emergency.”

  “But then we told you he’d been killed. The possibility must have crossed your mind.”

  He nodded. “That’s probably why I came off as such a prick that night. Part of me was happy that Robo was dead, but I was so angry, wondering whether Nick was somehow involved. So I asked him, of course. But he swore he had nothing to do with it. He told me how people get killed in these mistaken home invasions. He said it could’ve been a robbery attempt. And I’m sure I wanted those explanations to sound plausible. You don’t want to think the person you love has it in him to do something like that. Then the next thing we know, you’re asking about me and my enemies and my finances. I couldn’t cooperate, but I knew it only made me look guilty.”

  “If we’d opened your books, we would have found the payments to Prestige Parties,” Ellie said. “Eventually we would have asked the right question and figured out you were the one client of theirs who really was aboveboard.”

  “Lots of pretty girls to walk the red carpets with me. Nothing more, nothing less. And I truly didn’t think I had any information that would help you, or I would have turned it over. I believed Nick. And then you showed up at the Four Seasons last night.”

  “We said something that made you realize there was more to it.”

  “You told me that Robo had been with a woman from the service the night he was killed. It was too big of a coincidence. Robo didn’t know about the escort service, but Nick did. I realized that Nick had set him up.”

  Ellie remembered Genna Walsh’s description of her brother and husband snickering about Robo’s “sure thing.” She imagined Dillon pretending to cede to Mancini’s demands, throwing in all the corporate perks for good measure.

  “So you drove here after we confronted you at the Four Seasons.”

  He nodded. “Nick looked me in the eye and told me all over again that he didn’t do it. I could tell something was wrong, but I just didn’t want to believe he had that kind of evil in him. I said that to him, you know. I walked out on him and said, ‘You better be telling the truth, because whoever would do something like that is evil.’ Those were the last words I ever spoke to him. He tried to talk to me today outside the office, but I just got into my car and told the driver to leave. Nick did it, didn’t he? He killed Robo.”

  “We think he also killed a woman named Katie Battle. He brought another woman here tonight named Stacy Schecter, but she made it.”

  “No. No, he would never—”

  “He lied to you. I’m sorry.” Fifty-year-old men don’t suddenly go from shaking down Afghan opium farmers to murder to torture. Just as Dillon had managed to fool Sam Sparks for eight years, he had hidden inside the NYPD for twenty.

  “But, why? Why would he hurt these women? What did they have to do with Robo?”

  Ellie explained how Katie Battle was supposed to be Mancini’s date the night he was killed, but then the trick had been passed off to Stacy Schecter and then ultimately to Tanya Abbott. “We obviously have some loose ends to tie up, but it looks like Nick was trying to find the witness he’d left behind.”

  A flash of recognition passed through Sparks’s glazed eyes. “Nick was the one who wanted us to press for information about the woman who was Robo’s date that night.”

  “A woman named Tanya Abbott,” Ellie said.

  “The girl from the news?”

  She nodded.

  “But she’s missing.”

  “She was attacked earlier in the week. Her roommate was killed, and she’s been on the run ever since.”

  “And you think Nick did that too?”

  “We don’t know,” she said. “Based on some of the things he said to the woman he kidnapped tonight, we don’t think he knew about Tanya Abbott.”

  “And if he didn’t know about her—”

  “Then he’s not the one who went after her and her roommate.”

  “That’s not much consolation.”

  She watched him fall into silence—leaning against the Maybach’s gleaming hood, alone, staring at the ambulance as the engine started and strangers carried away the body of his dead partner. She could feel sympathy for him now, but none of it changed the fact that he had played a role in Dillon’s violence. She finally had to speak.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Sparks. Perhaps it’s cruel of me to say this right now, but when Mancini blackmailed you, why didn’t you just call his bluff?”

  He shook his head as he wiped away a tear from his left cheek. “There’s more to it than just being outed. People would’ve started asking questions about the women. The escorts, the money—”

  He cut himself off, but Ellie finished the thought for him. “You used a corporate card. And if that had come out, your investors might have asked about other expenses as well. My guess is, they would have found some other creative accounting? The Maybach. Maybe a little too much spending given the current economic climate?”

  She took Sparks’s sad nod as resignation, his financial concerns now eclipsed by Dillon’s death. “My entire corporate existence is linked to this image of unapologetic consumption. The truth is, I don’t have as much as the world thinks.” He fought the quiver of his lower lip. “Financing? Advertising? All gone if the world knows Sam Sparks is just another overleveraged developer, and a poof at that. And, even so, I was still tempted. I would have let Robo scream all of it from the rooftops.”

  “But Nick?”

  “Nick? I’m not sure which he was more worried about, that mess in Afghanistan or the truth about us. Ex-cop. Ex-military contractor badass. A grown man barely out of the closet to himself. Out of the question.” For the first time, she heard real anger in his voice and knew that this must have been an ongoing struggle between the two men. “And it wasn’t always easy to argue with him. Ask yourself, Detective: How will your colleagues react when they learn that Nick Dillon was queer?”

  Ellie wished she could tell Sparks he was wrong. Even so, Dillon had no justification for hurting Katie or Stacy.

  “What about Judge Bandon?” she asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Did you have a deal with him? To protect you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You didn’t have some kind of connection to him through Prestige?”

  “I went there for the girls, Detective, not middle-aged judges.” A sad smile worked its way through his pained expression, and he seemed to find some comfort in the humor. “You said something about this last night, and I was telling you the truth when I said you sounded like a lunatic.”

  “He did throw me in jail for you,” she said. “And hauled my partner in for an update on the case. We figured his special interest in the case was to protect you.”

  “Why in the world would the man protect me? It’s fashionable to hate the rich these days, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “But the rich can still help someone like Paul Bandon become a federal judge.”

  “Well, Guerrero did tell me he was surprised Bandon was hearing the case.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Because Bandon worked at Guerrero’s firm for a couple of years before he went on the bench. He didn’t officially have a conflict because I didn’t start using the firm until after Bandon left, but Guerrero told
me Bandon usually recuses himself from their cases so he doesn’t have to check on the timing issues.”

  Ellie remembered seeing a brief law firm entry beneath Bandon’s online picture, just between his stint in the Department of Justice and his appointment to the trial court. She’d known from Max that Guerrero was at one of the city’s top firms, but she hadn’t made the connection.

  “It never dawned on you that Bandon might be trying to work you for support?”

  “If that was part of the plan, he never told me. Or my lawyer.”

  Something didn’t sound right, but she believed Sparks was telling her everything he knew. She turned away from him, but he stopped her. “Will I be charged with anything, Detective?”

  “That will ultimately be up to the DA.” If Sparks’s suspicions about Dillon had formed only after the fact, she doubted that he had committed any crime, but she didn’t want to make any promises.

  “Fair enough. Do you know where they’d take him? The ambulance, I mean.”

  “He’ll go to the Bronx Medical Examiner’s Office. It’s on Pelham Parkway at Jacobi Medical Center.”

  “Well, the word will be out now for sure. I will insist on viewing his body and making the necessary arrangements, even as I’m sure someone will tell me I’m a non-family member. That should be fun.”

  She knew it would not be. She handed Sparks her business card. “You have any problems with the ME, you have them call me.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  9:45 P.M.

  It was nearly ten o’clock by the time she had a chance to call Rogan. He didn’t bother with greetings.

  “It’s about damn time.”

  “I was at Dillon’s.”

  “No shit. I finally gave up and called dispatch. All she could tell me was there was a homicide. She at least knew it wasn’t an officer down, or I’d be up there myself by now.”

  She gave him the short version: Tucker shot Dillon, Stacy was fine, Sparks hadn’t been involved.

  “Where are you?”