212

by Alafair Burke

  “Run Megan’s calls through the reverse directory and see what comes up?”

  “Or go to her friends. I got a list from the mom. According to her, there’s one girl we go to first. She’s in the city.”

  “Okay, you see her, but drop me at the precinct and I’ll start working on the phone history. See if our girl was calling anyone her parents didn’t know about.”

  Ellie dialed Courtney Chang’s number.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  4:05 P.M.

  Morningside Heights got its name from Morningside Park, which lines the east side of the neighborhood from 110th Street to 123rd. But most New Yorkers thought of Morningside Heights as an academic bastion in the middle of uptown, housing egghead students from nearby Columbia University and Barnard College. The late comedian George Carlin had called his old neighborhood White Harlem, and local business owners had now taken to calling the place SoHa, short for south of Harlem. With gentrification across the entire borough of Manhattan, many saw Morningside Heights as simply an extension of the Upper West Side.

  But Ellie and many others had a different cultural referent for this neighborhood. She parked in front of a fire hydrant at 112th and Broadway, looked up at the blue-backed neon sign that read “Tom’s Restaurant,” and could almost picture Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer at a booth inside the window. Courtney Chang lived above the diner that was first immortalized in song by Suzanne Vega and later on the television show Seinfeld as the ensemble’s daily diner.

  Courtney was waiting at her apartment, just as she’d promised when Ellie phoned. She opened the front door and turned away with nothing but a “Come on in,” and then plopped herself down on an overstuffed mocha-colored sofa littered with crumpled tissues.

  “Sorry.” She plucked up some of the mess from the couch and threw it to the floor, making room for Ellie to take a seat. “Whatever, I just can’t care about this right now.”

  “Of course not,” Ellie said. “Megan’s parents told us how close you two are.”

  “She’s my best friend. Was, I guess. Was my best friend. Since junior high school. We used to be inseparable.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Before college.” She used her fist, balled inside the overly long sleeve of her Columbia University sweatshirt, to push a shoulder-length strand of shiny black hair from her eyes. “We carpooled to school, took all our classes together, spent the night at each other’s houses every weekend. Like I said, inseparable. But now I’m up here, and she’s downtown, and, well, it wasn’t always easy to find time for each other. I can’t believe it’s too late.” She wiped a tear from her cheek with her sleeve.

  Ellie was beginning to wonder whether she’d made a mistake relying on Patricia Gunther’s information about her daughter’s friends. She was relieved when she asked Courtney if she’d happened to speak to Megan within the last couple of days.

  Courtney nodded. “Of course. Probably like…ten times. Patty told you about that fucking message board? Sorry—”

  Ellie smiled. “No problem. And, yes, we know about the messages. We’re trying to determine who might have posted them.”

  “You’re the police. Can’t you just—”

  “We tried. The information isn’t there. Whoever posted this stuff about Megan covered his tracks technologically. I was hoping you’d help me figure it out the old-fashioned way. Did Megan have any enemies?”

  Courtney shook her head. “No, that’s why the whole thing was so weird. I figured it was just someone from campus trying to screw with her mind. I told her it was no big deal. I can’t believe this. I actually told her to blow it off. To forget about it. What was I thinking?”

  “You were thinking what anyone would have assumed at the time. The truth is that ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the time, words really are just words. You couldn’t have known, Courtney.”

  “So poor Megan’s the unlucky one out of ten thousand. Because we all just assumed she’d be on the right side of the odds.”

  “Let me guess,” Ellie said, catching how quickly Courtney had translated a percentage into the odds. “Math major?”

  “Physics,” she said wearily.

  “I know this is probably the worst day of your life, but anything you can think of—anything that might stand out—could make a big difference.”

  Courtney shook her head. “Megan wasn’t the kind of person to make enemies. There was no drama with her. She studied. She worked out. She tried to make time for friends.”

  “Boyfriends?”

  “Not lately.”

  “But before?”

  “That was about as close as Megan ever came to having anything close to a scandal in her life. Freshman year she went totally gaga over this guy—”

  “Keith.”

  “Right, Keith.” Courtney’s expression changed as she realized the significance of Ellie’s preexisting knowledge of Megan’s ex-boyfriend. “You don’t think that…Oh, my God, why didn’t I figure that out?”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  “I should have thought of Keith when she told me about those postings. I work a frickin’ domestic violence hotline, for Christ’s sake. It’s all about power and control, and, yeah, Keith wanted both of those. Writing those awful things about her—trying to scare her, and of course through a site read by NYU students, no less.”

  “You’re going a little too fast for me here, Courtney. Take a deep breath, slow down, and tell me what you know about Keith.”

  “Megan met him at a club first semester of freshman year. He’s like a DJ or something. They were crazy about each other right away, but then Keith took it way too seriously. It’s like he could never get enough attention from her. He was jealous—not of other guys, because Megan wasn’t like that—but of her life. Her classes. Her reading. Me, when we had the time for each other.”

  “When did they break up?”

  “About three months ago. But they were on and off for a good four months before that. I’d say the tipping point was when Heather moved in—the roommate?”

  Ellie nodded to confirm she knew to whom Courtney was referring.

  “Last spring Megan’s parents told her she needed to find a roommate to share the costs of the apartment. Keith offered to move in and share the rent. It was a ridiculous suggestion for all kinds of reasons. She’d never get her work done if he was around. Not to mention that there’s no way he could afford the rent her parents were looking for. Not to mention the fact that she was only twenty years old, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Plenty of reasons not to shack up.”

  “Right. But instead of fighting over it all, Megan took the easy route and told him that her parents would never allow it. And then he asked whether she had even talked to her parents about it. She made the mistake of telling him the truth.”

  “She never approached them?”

  “Of course not,” Courtney said. “It was an absurd idea, but not to Keith. I guess after she found Heather and rented the extra room to her, Keith treated every interaction with Heather—or even remotely related to her—as an excuse to remind Megan that she had rejected him. You don’t even know that girl. Now we never have any privacy. We could have kept that as an extra room. You never took me seriously. And on that last one, Megan finally had to admit he was right. For her, for her life, the thought of living together was crazy. But for Keith, it had meant everything.”

  “And that’s what ended it.”

  “Yep. It was hard on her, but he came with too much drama, you know? He was always trying to pull her away from school. It would be just like him to use a message board aimed at college students to get to her.”

  “But when Megan told you about the postings, you didn’t think Keith might be responsible?”

  “It never even dawned on me. It should have, though, right? He wanted to isolate her. He knew her routine. Maybe if she was too afraid to live her life, she’d go back to him. It’s so obvious.”

  E
llie was careful not to overvalue Courtney’s instincts. She had seen witnesses respond this way before. Once they believed police had homed in on a suspect, witnesses changed their perceptions so that suddenly the suspect’s name at the top of the list seemed inevitable.

  “All I’ve got on Keith right now is a first name and pierced lower lip,” Ellie said. “You got a last name for us?”

  Courtney pressed her eyes closed. “Shit. This is impossible, right? Megan had to have told me his last name at some point. I just don’t remember. It was always ‘Keith this, Keith that.’ I don’t know. Something Spanish, I think. He said he was half Dominican. Maybe…Guzaro, or Guittierez. For some reason, I think it began with a G.”

  “What about a phone number? Address?” They had already checked Megan’s cell phone for a Keith, but she must have erased his number after the breakup.

  Courtney shook her head. “He always went to her place. He still lives with his mother. Wait.” She hopped up from the sofa, made her way to a dining room table covered with books and notebooks, and flipped open a laptop. “I have a picture.”

  Ellie rose from the couch and looked over Courtney’s shoulder while she clicked through a library of photos. Girls at a bowling alley. Another set on a beach somewhere with tall fruity drinks. On the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Courtney sniffled. “Okay, here he is.”

  Ellie leaned forward to get a better look. Megan was on the left side of the screen, her long blond hair curled softly around her shoulders, a broad smile across her face. The young man with his arm around her shoulder mugged for the camera, replicating a model’s exaggerated pout. He had creamy light brown skin and dark brown wavy hair. She could see how his racial identity might appear ambiguous. Nice smile. Round cheeks. He would have been a good-looking kid without the two platinum hoops dangling from either side of his lower lip like metal fangs.

  “Any others?” Ellie asked.

  Courtney shook her head. “No, I snapped this during one of the few times he tagged along. I doubt you’ll find any pictures of him at Megan’s either. She deleted them all to prove that the breakup was for good. She still wore the necklace he gave her, though. I noticed that.”

  “Can you e-mail the picture to me?” Ellie asked. She rattled off her personal Gmail address while Courtney typed, then watched as Courtney hit the send key on a message she had labeled “Predator.”

  “We should have gone to the same school,” Courtney said, thinking aloud. “The original plan was for both of us to go to Columbia, but she didn’t get in. I should have gone to NYU with her. Maybe then—”

  “Courtney, you don’t know me from a hole in the ground, but trust me, I speak from experience: Don’t start down that road of maybes. You’ll create the kind of demons that can destroy you for years.”

  When Courtney closed the door behind her, Ellie pictured the girl back at the dining room table, clicking again through the files of old photographs, and knew her advice was useless.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  4:50 P.M.

  Ellie had parallel-parked on Twenty-first Street and was about to open the car door when she spotted Lieutenant Robin Tucker in her rearview mirror. She decided to avoid an encounter and stayed put inside the car, watching as her lieutenant let the precinct door swing closed behind her. Tucker paused just outside the precinct, opened a slim gold metallic handbag, and swept some gloss across her lips. She reached into the same bag again and then clipped her hair into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. As she walked in Ellie’s direction, Tucker’s tan trench blew open, revealing a dark green wrap dress that played up her pale skin. From the looks of things, Tucker had spruced herself up for something.

  Ellie slumped into her seat and continued to watch as Tucker smiled and gave a friendly wave to someone on the other side of the street. As she turned to cross Twenty-first, Ellie lost sight of her in the rearview mirror.

  She adjusted the right side-view mirror to get a better look. Browsing the cars parked on the north side of the street, she speculated about which one was her lieutenant’s intended destination.

  Then her eyes fell on a black Infiniti sedan.

  “No fucking way,” she said to no one in particular. She adjusted the side-view mirror again to confirm what she had seen. Sure enough, she recognized the Infiniti’s driver.

  Robin Tucker had spruced herself up for none other than Nick Dillon, the head of corporate security for Sparks Industries.

  Ellie found Rogan hunched over a spread of documents across his desktop. She recognized the pages as call logs, most of them from AT&T wireless, and a few from Verizon.

  “You got the call dumps already?”

  Rogan nodded, but didn’t look up from his papers. “Cell phone and landline. A lot more activity on the cell, of course.”

  Phone companies could produce itemized lists of call activity for cell phones, but for landlines they could provide information only about outbound long-distance calls. Fortunately for this case, young people tended to use their cell phones for most of their calls.

  “You happen to see Tucker walk out of here?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “She was all dressed up.”

  Silence.

  “And guess who was waiting for her outside?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Nick Dillon. Un-freakin’-believable.”

  Silence.

  “Find any Keiths yet on those call lists?”

  “Nope,” Rogan said.

  “Anything else in there to get excited about?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any chance I can get a few more words, just so I can pretend you’re listening to me?”

  “Sorry,” Rogan said, finally leaning back in his chair and turning his attention to her. “Maybe I’m in a piss-poor mood after all.”

  “Gee, you think? If the tables were turned, you’d be on your fifth PMS joke by now.”

  “All right, so you were saying about the Lou?”

  “She just left the building looking a hell of a lot better than I’ve ever seen her around here, and jumped into a car driven by Nick Dillon.”

  “She told you yesterday she knew the man.”

  “Knowing him’s different than boning him.”

  “You think you might be jumping the gun? He called her yesterday to give her a heads-up about your ass being in jail. They go way back to patrol days, decide to get a drink—no big thing.”

  “Well, you didn’t see her.”

  “So cut the woman some slack. She wants to look decent around a guy like Dillon. I seem to recall you primping your hair and shit when you first met with Max Donovan.”

  “Yeah, and look where that got me. She’s got something for Dillon.”

  “So what if she does? The dude’s been decent to us, right?” He pointed an index finger at her. “You might’ve been in the doghouse with Tucker if he hadn’t schmoozed her and her smitten little ass on your behalf.”

  Ellie plopped herself down at the desk across from him. “Maybe. So what’s up with the call records?”

  “We got a ton of calls back and forth with her parents—I guess that’s normal for college students these days, can’t cut the cord. Local carry-out joints every couple of days. Bunch of girlfriends—the reverse directory listings come back to a handful of girls on that list you got from the mom.”

  “Including Courtney Chang?”

  “Yep, a bunch between her and your girl Courtney. No Keith. No other dudes. No late-night booty calls. This girl was chaste, man.”

  Ellie shook her head. “Courtney couldn’t help us find this Keith guy either. I did get a photograph, though. Figured I’d search records for first name Keith with a lip piercing. See what comes up.”

  Ellie’s phone buzzed at her waist. According to the screen, it was Jess.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You busy?”

  “Always. What’s up?”

  “Please tell me you don’t have something goin
g on with DJ Anus So Hottica.”

  “Do I even want to know what you’re talking about?”

  “Your e-mail.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you to stay out of my cyber shit? There’s, like, actually real laws against that stuff. I am a cop, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “Can’t help it, El. You leave your new-mail alert open on your laptop so your messages pop up and interfere with my porn surfing.”

  “Nice. That’s an image I want in my head all day.”

  “Oh, trust me, the images I’ve been working on are so much better.”

  “So, I’m sorry. What was the point of all this?”

  “Your e-mail. I couldn’t exactly ignore a subject line like ‘Predator,’ could I? So I opened the message, and what do I see but that electronica-loving poseur. I’m all for you finding some barely legal boy toy, but that lightweight?”

  “Seriously, Jess. Who are you talking about?”

  “The picture in your e-mail. He goes by DJ Anorexotica.” He dragged out the name dramatically.

  “What picture? Wait. Are you talking about an e-mail from someone named Courtney Chang?”

  “Yeah, I guess. The sender address says ChangBang@macmail. That plus the subject line had me, shall we say, intrigued.”

  “Jesus, Jess. It’s an e-mail on a case. You mean you know the guy in that picture?”

  “Duh. What have I been saying? You’re not going out with him, are you?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  6:00 P.M.

  In the bedroom of her Upper East Side Yorkville apartment, Katie Battle removed a beaded necklace and matching chandelier earrings from the thin top dresser drawer that held her jewelry. She was thirty-one years old and still used the same dresser that she had taken from her parents’ home when she moved out after college.

  A few years ago, after selling enough real estate to buy a small chunk of her own, she had nearly splurged on new furniture to fill the place. The market had been going strong for three straight years. She had a five-digit savings account. She was feeling confident. She picked out each and every piece herself, circling items in different home decorating catalogs, making sure that everything would work together.