She gave Stuart a quick but subtle once-over. He was probably just past fifty, but he was still in decent shape. A full head of dark hair, but she suspected the assistance of a toupee. Titanium wedding band. Decent suit and tie. A little shy. Clean.
Pretty routine.
Stuart eyed the bartender nervously. “Um, the bar’s a little tight. You want to move over—” He gestured toward an empty brown leather sofa toward the front of the bar, not far from the entrance to the hotel lobby. She led the way while Stuart ordered himself a Maker’s Mark neat and dropped cash on the counter for the two drinks.
Once he was seated next to her on the couch, Miranda noticed his left thumb fiddling with his wedding band.
“Are you going to be okay?” She placed her hand gently on him, only at his knee, no higher. The last thing she needed was this guy to succumb to a sudden attack of piousness.
Stuart held his highball glass with both hands and stared at the swirling brown liquid.
“Sorry. Last night was my twentieth anniversary.”
She reminded herself she was Miranda and forced herself to keep her hand planted exactly where it was. As if she were comfortable.
“Charlotte was in an accident three years ago. Spinal damage.” He wiped at his eyes. “God, I’m sorry. It’s, well, this isn’t the first time or anything. And I suspect she even sort of knows. But, you know, last night—”
“Sure,” she said, giving his knee a reaffirming squeeze. “Maybe another night,” she offered, confident that he would decline the offer of a rain check, just like the reluctant buyers who argued with her if she suggested that an apartment might still be available down the road.
He shook his head and downed a sip of his bourbon. “No, I’m good. I’ll be fine once we’re upstairs.” He gave her a sad smile. “Is that okay? If we go upstairs?”
“No problem,” she said, rising from her place on the sofa. “And, remember, tonight you’re anyone you want. You can be Derek Jeter as far as I’m concerned.”
He laughed.
“Go ahead. Lie to me.”
He looked at her reluctantly but rose from the couch to face her.
“Really,” she repeated softly, almost in a whisper, “go ahead. Lie to me.”
He placed his hand on her elbow. “I’m Mike. I’m in town for a convention.”
“Yeah?”
“And I’m single.”
“Well, nice to meet you, Mike. And I’ll be anyone you want in return.”
“I do have a favor to ask.” He continued to hold her elbow. “Is it possible for you to book the room in your name?”
“I don’t usually—”
“It’s my…well, my wife,” he said, looking down at his feet. “It’s one thing to do this to her under the circumstances. It’s another to flaunt it. A charge on the credit card would—”
“Sure, I understand. It’s just I carry a balance, and so with interest—”
“I’ll make up for it.”
He’d obviously made this arrangement before, as had she. It was a common practice, a way for girls to get some extra cash to themselves on the side. She’d never been ratted on yet.
“All right. Mike.”
“Mike’s gonna go outside for a smoke. I’ll meet you by the elevators?”
She nodded and watched him walk outside.
At the registration desk, she asked the clerk for a single room. While the clerk ran her credit card through the system, Miranda dug her cell phone from her purse, pulled up a number in her list of contacts, and hit the dial key.
“It’s Miranda. I just wanted you to know I already sent flowers to Mom, so you don’t need to worry about it.”
The substance of what she said was irrelevant. What mattered was her use of the word flowers. Stuart passed the no-freaks-allowed test, and Miranda was fine.
The word tight was another story. One utterance of the word tight and help would be on its way. Or at least that’s how it had been explained to her.
She understood the need for a check-in system, but she’d been doing this now for six months and still didn’t see why they had to be so James Bond about it. She supposed it played into the myth that what she was doing was acting. Role-playing. Fantasy. A “hobby,” as some of the so-called providers dubbed it. Something other than what it obviously was.
Stuart (or Mike) was already walking toward her when she approached the elevator, the fading smell of cigarette smoke still on him. She pressed the up button. They waited alone.
“They explained to you I only do what’s safe?” she asked. Even some of the tamest men would pressure her to avoid condoms.
He nodded, but his embarrassment about the subject showed in his flushed cheeks. “That’s…well, of course, that’s my preference. I’m…I’m definitely safe.”
When the elevator doors opened, Miranda stepped inside and Stuart followed. Only minutes later, the fantasy had fallen away, and Miranda was back to being Katie Battle.
And that night, Katie was definitely not safe.
PART III
IT WAS ALL ABOUT MAY 27.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
8:45 P.M.
With more than a decade passed since the move from Wichita to New York, Ellie was still struck by random reminders of how much her life had changed as a result of that geographic switch. She had grown up in a place where arguments about pizza revolved around the choice between Pizza Hut and Domino’s. Now a craving for pizza could spark a thirty-minute debate about the relative virtues of the crispy, charred crusts of John’s in the West Village compared to the white pies at Lombardi’s. And then there were those who swore that real New York pizza could only be found in Brooklyn.
Fortunately, Ellie had been spared any such discussion. When she’d called Max Donovan to say she was finally ready for a break and could use some pizza, they both knew precisely the place she had in mind.
Ellie pushed her way through Otto’s narrow revolving door. The name was Italian for the number eight, reflecting the restaurant’s location on Eighth Street, just north of Washington Square Park. If Ellie had been told a dozen years earlier that a craving for pizza would lead her to a crowded Mario Batali wine bar just a block from the famous park arches where Harry had dropped off Sally, she never would have believed it.
But now Otto was Max and Ellie’s “place.” They didn’t have a song or an anniversary or cutesy nicknames for each other, but in the rituals of their relationship, they had developed a well-practiced habit of sitting at the Otto bar, drinking wine and nibbling on small plates of antipasti, pizza, and pasta.
“There she is.”
The head bartender, Dennis, wore his usual white oxford shirt, blue jeans, and Buddha-like smile. He was already pouring two fingers of Johnnie Walker Black into a lowball glass, which he set before the awaiting empty stool next to Max Donovan.
“I was just telling the DA here that you must be working harder than him these days. Am I ordering for you, or do you want menus?”
“Your choice tonight,” Ellie said.
“And how hungry are we?”
“Very.”
“Good. We like hungry people here.” Dennis topped off Max’s glass of red wine and made his way to the other end of the bar.
“To the end of the day,” Max said, raising his glass for a clink.
They had been keeping their relationship casual, but she had allowed Max deep enough into her life that he knew how much she hated the natural pause points in a hot case. You jump from lead to lead, from witness to witness, from the morgue to the crime lab, but at some point, you have to rest. Take a breath. Take a break. Take a fresh look later.
Some cops could turn off during those moments. Close out all thoughts of the case and live their lives until it was time to tune back in. Not Ellie. She’d been moving nonstop for nearly twelve hours on an empty stomach and knew she’d be awake the rest of the night from the lingering adrenaline.
“So what’s next on that Web site case of yo
urs?” Max also knew her well enough to anticipate she’d need to talk about the case to transition back into any kind of normal conversation. “Hopefully you’ll get something off the boyfriend’s laptop.”
Ellie had called Max from Gaslight to make sure she had probable cause to seize Guzman’s computer. He agreed that she could act without a warrant to prevent Guzman from cleaning out the hard drive. Unfortunately, he also agreed it was premature to haul Guzman in for questioning.
“I dropped the laptop off with the analyst. I swear, that kid looked like he was fifteen years old. And he called me ma’am. But, fuck it, I told him he could call me Grandma as long as he had something for me tomorrow afternoon.”
A skinny Italian kid with an apron and ponytail set a collection of dishes in front of them, and Dennis interrupted to announce the contents of their meal. It involved meats and cheeses she couldn’t even pronounce, but to her it all boiled down to pizza and pasta and was therefore perfect.
She plunged her fork into a plate of spaghetti carbonara without waiting for Max. “And how was your day today?”
“Fine. I had that ridiculous charade this morning with Bandon, of course. Then after you left for Long Island, I spent the rest of the afternoon on a murder plea with Judge Walker. It was like pulling teeth.”
“The defendant wussed out?” Exchanging twenty-five years to get out from under a true life-sentence sounded like a good deal until the defendant actually had to seal his own fate in open court.
“No, he got hungry and apparently pretty sick of the prison slop he’ll be eating for the next quarter century. He wouldn’t plead guilty unless the judge got him some McGriddle cakes and gorditas.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“He wouldn’t plead unless we got him his food. And not just any fast food. Two McGriddle cakes and two Taco Bell Gordita Supremes, one chicken and one beef.”
“I’m not falling for this.” Max had a way of exaggerating or even fabricating entire stories, anything to make her laugh.
He held up his right hand in a mock oath. “I swear to God. After an hour trying to explain why the guy shouldn’t waive important constitutional rights in exchange for fast food, Judge Walker finally broke down. Apparently, though, it violates personnel rules for the guards to give anything unauthorized to the prisoners. So then Walker sent his bailiff out on a food run, but he came back without the Mickey D’s. I guess McGriddle cakes are a breakfast menu item and therefore unavailable after eleven a.m. I finally schmoozed up a manager and got it done.”
Of course he had. Max could talk the archbishop into converting. “Now that’s power.”
“No, real power in the culinary world would involve persuading you to leave me some of that spaghetti.”
She shook her head quickly and took another bite, but pushed what remained on the plate in his direction. Just as she felt the tension of the day leave her body, her phone vibrated at her waist. It was Rogan.
“Yeah,” she said, cupping her free hand around the mouthpiece to block out the Clash song playing overhead.
“You’re with your boy, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, say good-bye. We’ve got another body.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
9:15 P.M.
Police presence at the Royalton Hotel was glaring. The streets of midtown had otherwise quieted after the evening commute bustle, leaving the relatively few pedestrians free to gawk at the growing collection of NYPD officers and marked vehicles camped out on Forty-fourth Street.
Ellie’s cabdriver, glimpsing the chaos ahead, had refused to turn off Madison Avenue out of fear that he’d be stuck for twenty minutes in a tangle of double-parked city cars and rubber-necking tourists on the cross street. She tried to persuade him with the badge, but finally paid the fare with no tip and hoofed her way east to the hotel.
The uni posted near the elevators paid more attention to the lobby decor than the people walking past him. She rode up to the fifth floor and found Rogan in the hallway, his finger in the face of a young officer in uniform.
“I don’t care if you need to call your precinct commander. Someone needs to clear out every rubbernecking uni who’s got no business in this hotel.”
The officer gave Rogan the appropriate “Yes, sir,” but she caught the eye-roll when he turned toward the elevator.
“Who called the cavalry?” she asked.
“Bunch of numbskulled unis want to get a glimpse of how the other half lives. Their usual callout to a hotel’s gonna be at some rub-and-tug rathole by the Lincoln Tunnel.”
“What are we doing in midtown, Rogan?” He’d given her an address and a room number on the phone, but no details.
“I brought Sydney here for a drink.”
“Nice.”
“It was till I saw hotel security huddled in the lobby like they’d just gotten a call from bin Laden himself. Sydney made me check what was going on.”
“Which was what?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
He used a plastic card key to open Room 509. A uniformed officer shook his head silently as he pressed past them on his way out. The gesture didn’t begin to convey the disgust Ellie felt when they walked into the hotel room.
The girl had been left hog-tied on her side, her pale skin gray against the bright white sheets as livor mortis set in. Black nylon rope bound her wrists and feet together at the small of her back. Smears of blood on the sheets and on her body suggested the girl had been cut as well.
On the pillowcase next to the woman’s head were blots of mascara, face powder, rouge, and lipstick the color of blackberries. Like a makeup mask, the smudged colors created the outline of a face with wide, pained eyes and a contorted mouth. It was a mask of terror.
“Jesus,” Ellie said.
“A housekeeper came in for evening turndown service at eight. There was a Do Not Disturb sign on the door when she circled the floor an hour earlier. She probably just missed the guy. She got one look at this and walked right on out and radioed security. I was up here before the first responders.”
Two crime scene unit officers scoured for physical evidence, one in the bathroom, one kneeling at the edge of the bed. The one near the bed looked up in their direction.
“The meat truck’s here. They were waiting for you before moving the body. We all set?”
Rogan shook his head.
“You know I back you up on everything, Rogan, but my last forty-eight hours have been crap. Do you really need me here to wait for Midtown South DTs to show up?”
“This is our case.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll tell you in a sec, but I want your first impressions. I found a business card in her purse. Her name’s Katie Battle. She was a real estate broker for Corcoran. She put the four-hundred-dollar room on her credit card.”
Ellie was about to press him for an explanation, but could see there was no point. “I don’t know. My first guess would be rough sex gone bad. Bondage, pretty typical. A little too much pressure on the neck, it happens. But cutting? Pretty hard-core for the luxury hotel crowd.”
She moved closer to the body. “You mind?” The CSU officer kneeling on the floor rose and stepped aside. Ellie took his place, crouching to get a better look. She suppressed a gag reflex. “This woman was tortured.”
Rogan stood behind her, and she pointed as she spoke. “Her nipples have been slashed on both sides. And look here, beneath the blood, she’s got at least three cigarette burns on her chest.”
“Holy shit. Look at her hands.”
Ellie rose so she could see the other side of the woman’s body where her hands and feet were bound. Several of the girl’s fingers were bent at various angles.
“I counted at least six broken fingers here,” Rogan said.
“Broken bones. The bondage. Burning. Cutting. This wasn’t just a little light S&M getting out of control. She was tortured to death.”
“Bingo.”
“So now tell me: Why are we here?”
“Because that business card wasn’t the only thing I found in the vic’s purse. I checked out her BlackBerry. You remember those call logs I had from the Megan Gunther callout?”
“Sure.”
“Well, yesterday afternoon, Katie Battle called one of the numbers on that list.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
9:40 P.M.
“Hey, Rain Man. Get around this idiot, will you?”
Rogan swerved his BMW around a minivan with Vermont plates meandering in the right lane.
“How long are you going to keep up this Rain Man shit?”
Ellie looked at her watch. “It’s been about thirty minutes. I’m thinking about sixteen more years and I’ll be done.”
“Really, it’s no big deal.”
“Yeah, okay. Whatever. ‘I’m an excellent driver. Fifteen minutes to Judge Wapner. 82-82-82. 246 total.’”
“Look who’s the Rain Man.”
“I can’t believe, out of all the numbers on Megan Gunther’s call list, you recognized a match to Battle’s BlackBerry.”
“This is coming from the woman who still remembers the date of birth of the first perp she arrested?”
“And I’m pretty sure you called me a freak when I made the mistake of telling you about it.”
“You know how long I stared at those call logs trying to figure out who we needed to talk to first? I remembered a call that went from Megan’s landline to some number in Connecticut. But it was a onetime call, and four months ago at that, so we didn’t get to it yet. But I looked at the lists long enough to recognize those same digits when I saw them again.”
The number belonged to a cell phone owned by a woman named Stacy Schecter. Schecter had a Connecticut area code, but according to AT&T, the bills went to an apartment on the Lower East Side.
“A twenty-year-old-college student and a thirty-one-year-old real estate agent, both making phone calls to the same woman.” Rogan pulled the car to a stop in front of a fire hydrant on Avenue B and 4th Street. “So who’s Stacy Schecter going to turn out to be?”
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